1. Look up the following related topics, and post the findings to your blog:
- Political Correctness
- Plain English Campaign
- The Crystal Mark
- Dog Whistle Politics
- World Englishes
Political Correctness
This is a term which, in modern usage, is used to describe language, policies, or measures which are intended not to offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society.
Prescriptivist View of Political Correctness- The group may be in favour of political correctness as it's prescribing 'correct' language. However it could also be seen as language change and an attack on language, linking to decay and the crumbling castle metaphor.
Descriptivist View of Political Correctness- They may see political correctness as a form of prescriptivism and therefore be against it.
Norman Fairclough- This theorist suggests that political correctness isn't enough and that we need to change society and the way it thinks about minority groups.
Plain English Campaign
Since 1979 the Plain English Campaign has been campaigning against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information. They help governments, organisations and their documents, reports and publications as they believe everyone should have access to clear and concise information.
The Crystal Mark
The crystal mark is approved by the Plain English Campaign and is the seal of approval for the clarity of a document. It now appears on over 21,000 different documents in the UK, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand and South Africa. It is the only internationally recognised mark of its kind. The Crystal Mark has a fee and allows people to edit subsequent minor changes to any Crystal Marked document that Plain English approve of.
Dog Whistle Politics
This is a political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. The phrase if often used as a pejorative because of the inherently deceptive nature of the practice and because the dog whistle messages are frequently distasteful to the general populace. The analogy is to dog whistle, whose high-frequency whistle is heard by dogs but inaudible to humans.
World Englishes
This is a term for emerging localised or indigenized varieties of English, especially varieties that have developed in territories influenced by the United Kingdom or the United States.
Another reason for change is that no two people have had exactly the same language experience. We all know a slightly different set of words and constructions, depending on our age, job, education level, region of the country, and so on. We pick up new words and phrases from all the different people we talk with, and these combine to make something new and unlike any other person's particular way of speaking. At the same time, various groups in society use language as a way of marking their group identity; showing who is and isn't a member of the group.
2. Find some examples of the ways English is changing and link it to:
- Standardisation
- Simplification
- Reasons for language change
Standardisation
This is the process by which conventional forms of a language are established and maintained. It may occur as a natural development of a language in a speech community or as an effort by members of a community to impose one dialect or variety as a standard. The term re-standardisation refers to the way in which a language may be reshaped by its speakers/ writers.
Simplification
Making the language less complex
Also occurs a lot in CLA where children often simplify pronounciation by deleting certain sounds:
- Final consonants maybe dropped e.g. the sound 't' in 'hat' or 'cat'
- Unstressed syllables are often deleted e.g. 'banana' becomes 'nana'
- Consonant clusters are reduced e.g. 'snake' becomes 'nake' and 'sleep' becomes 'seep'
http://revisionworld.com/a2-level-level-revision/english-language/child-language-acquisition/phonological-development
Reasons for Language Change
http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/english-changing
"Language changes for several reasons. First, it changes because the needs of its speakers change. New technologies, new products, and new experiences require new words to refer to them clearly and efficiently. Consider texting: originally it was called text messaging, because it allowed one person to send another text rather than voice messages by phone. As that became more common, people began using the shorter form text to refer to both the message and the process, as in I just got a text or I'll text someone right now.
Many of the changes that occur in language begin with teens and young adults. As young people interact with others their own age, their language grows to include words, phrases, and constructions that are different from those of the older generation. Some have a short life span (heard groovy lately?), but others stick around to affect the language as a whole.
We get new words from many different places. We borrow them from other languages (sushi, chutzpah), we create them by shortening longer words (gym from gymnasium) or by combining words (brunch from breakfast and lunch), and we make them out of proper names (Levis, fahrenheit). Sometimes we even create a new word by being wrong about the analysis of an existing word, like how the word pea was created. Four hundred years ago, the word pease was used to refer to either a single pea or a bunch of them, but over time, people assumed Excerpt from Beowulf that pease was a plural form, for which pea must be the singular. Therefore, a new word, pea, was born. The same thing would happen if people began to think of the word cheese as referring to more than one chee.
Word order also changes, though this process is much slower. Old English word order was much more 'free' than that of Modern English, and even comparing the Early Modern English of the King James Bible with today's English shows differences in word order. For example, the King James Bible translates Matthew 6:28 as "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not." In a more recent translation, the last phrase is translated as "they do not toil,” because English no longer places not after the verb in a sentence.
The sounds of a language change over time, too. About 500 years ago, English began to undergo a major change in the way its vowels were pronounced. Before that, geese would have rhymed with today's pronunciation of face, while mice would have rhymed with today's peace. However, a 'Great Vowel Shift' began to occur, during which the ay sound (as in pay) changed to ee (as in fee) in all the words containing it, while the ee sound changed to i (as in pie). Overall, seven different vowel sounds were affected. If you've ever wondered why most other European languages spell the sound ay with an ‘e’ (as in fiancé), and the sound ee with an ‘i’ (as in aria), it's because those languages didn't undergo the Great Vowel Shift, only English did."
3. Find a quote to memorise for AO2 and AO3
- AO2- Concepts and Issues
- AO3- Contextual Factors
http://crossref-it.info/files/files/Language_change.pdf
4. Find some words to exemplify language change, and terminology to attach to them
http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/languagechange.htm
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