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General analysis of changes in languages is too vague to be able to identify them

   Geography is a key factor in language change for instance Proto-Indo-European branched off into different language groups as the population spread out from its base somewhere in central Asia and settled in different parts of the world. The further individuals and even populations travel from the source of a language, the more likely it is for a new language to develop that, in time, will differ greatly from its origins. Study of the Romance languages shows this clearly; Italian is the language spoken nearest to the roots of its parent language, Latin, and therefore all aspects of the language remains the most similar to it. Geographical isolation can be an important factor in limiting changes in language as is the case in Iceland and Lithuania.

   The incorporation of inherited and borrowed words into a language can be put down to the proximity of neighbouring countries and the inevitable contact they have with one another resulting in mutual influence on their lexicons. When mathematical advances were made in the Arabic speaking world, words for crucial terms such as algebra (al-jabr) simply didn’t exist in the Spanish lexicon, so the term was simply borrowed. An indirect borrowing of the word бlgebra from Arabic occurred when English speakers took on the word after encountering the usage of it amongst Spanish speakers. However the adoption of syntactic systems is rare, due to the fact the systems that languages of neighbouring countries have in place are likely to be entirely sufficient and that reform would take hundreds of years to complete. Borrowing will only usually occur out of necessity. The predictability of loan words is also regular. When a word doesn’t not exist in one language, it can be taken from the language of the country where the word originates. This can depend on the necessity for usage of the word as opposed to geographical proximity, for example the word kimono has been taken from Japanese and moccasin was borrowed from Native American languages.

   In recent years Americanisation has affected many languages. Quite simply America’s global dominance, with regards to the economy and commercialisation, has lead to the infiltration of words such as hamburger and more recently the internet into most European languages, to the dismay of the language Academies. However these lexical items are integrated within the grammatical system of each language, obeying the usual rules.

   Morphological language change has often resulted from a change in the phonological rules of a language. This has been the case over the past 1,000 years for most Indo-European languages. Only Lithuanian and Russian retain case endings of nouns in a way that is presumed to be similar to Indo-European.

   Steven Pinker estimates that 1/5 of all English verbs have come from nouns. This can be recognised in synchronic as well as diachronic linguistics. An older noun to verb change is shop (C14th) producing to shop in the 18th century. More recent additions include to host, to trial and to access. This pattern is stable and as the semantics of certain nouns change the likelihood of a corresponding verb being created will increase.

   Changes that occur due to historical developments can be unpredictable and difficult to subject to linguistic analysis. The development of Old English to Middle English was heavily influenced as a result of the Norman Conquest. Dominance of a foreign speaking political power can change the lexicon in this instance it primarily concerned words involved in law, administration, religion and culture; government, judge, royal and society are words of French origin that replaced perfectly adequate Saxon words.

   Spelling was also altered during this 300 year period, as French scribes would note down English words as they sounded to them. Along with these lexical changes, a morphological change to English gradually took place as the two languages clashed. Gender systems for example existed in different forms in both French and English, but both tended to be dropped. This produced a version of English that was more modern and simplified. Languages can outlive the people who introduced them. However no clear explanation exists for one outlasting the other. Latin outlasted the Gauls in France but had little lasting impact in England.

   Regional dialects show great variation on what was, in some cases, a uniform language and can pose a difficult problem when studying language change, as they conform to no logical pattern of difference from the standard language of a country. This usually comes from the dialect of the area of greatest political power, this being the South-east Midland dialect (encompassing London, Oxford and Cambridge) in England. A written standard language is particularly important for communication between regions and between people of different social groups. However the oral form of a standard language can be the most susceptible to change, as it is the type of language that is used most frequently and in the most widespread areas; as in the example of modern English. The influence of mass communication is producing a phonological change whereby regional accents are declining and becoming replaced by “estuary English” one of whose primary features is the glottal stop. English is also widely spoken as a second language or the primary foreign language of many speakers. Exposure to such people naturally brings about their changing the language which can cause the creation of pidgin forms, for example the widely used Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea. However dialects that do not form the standard language tend to alter less rapidly due to the fewer number of speakers who often have a desire to retain the vocabulary that is seen as a part of their culture.

   Diachronic changes in semantics are diverse and often unpredictable. Patterns exist only in the classification of the certain types of change. Semantic word change tends to fall into three main groups. The meaning of a word can broaden, the term dogge in Middle English referred to a particular breed of dog; narrow, the word deer used to mean animal but narrowed to mean a particular species or shift the word silly in Old English meant happy, in Middle English this shifted to naпve and now has come to mean foolish.

   Semantic changes are always occurring. Currently a shift in English is taking place in the word disinterested. Traditionally the word means to be impartial, however present generations are confusing the word which is now becoming a synonym for uninterested.
Due to the vast time period of language change and the sheer number of factors that affect it, it can be difficult to understand why changes affect certain aspects of the language and not others. In English ough has eight different recognised forms of pronunciation. In addition to this, in Chinese for example, the oral forms of a language can change out of all recognition to become a different language yet at the same time written form can remain mutually intelligible. This shows that speech and written language are two very different areas that can change in different ways, and that these changes can happen independently of each other.

   Changes in language can also occur due to individual speakers. It is true that parole, according to F. de Sassure, is the way in which an individual produces their language; however these changes can be perpetuated permanently when new generations adopt traits from their parents by “creative copying,” so that gradually, a language changes imperceptibly to a current speaker, unless it is compared with the language of previous generations. For example the differences in lexicon and even intonation of voice heard on film footage of the First World War and even as recently as the Fifties. Analogical formations can also become accepted into standard language, in Old English the –s ending was only one of many plurals but is now standard.
As mentioned previously, social factors such as the development of technology and changes in education, along with words that come into (and out of) fashion can affect languages, particularly within the younger generations, without any apparent predictability. Certain buzz words change semantically from one generation to become the latest word for ‘cool,’ ultimately, these trends rely on the individual to decide whether to use and pass on such words so that they become embedded in the lexicon.

   It must be said that the unpredictability of language change caused by the influence of history and social factors, can only show certain tendencies for changes that happen rather than them complying to rigid rules. Even though patterns can be analysed in diachronic linguistics, this is simply a demonstration of what has occurred as opposed to an explanation as to why the change has happened. The diversity of language change is so great, and on the whole unpredictable that it can not be submitted to complete and generalised analysis.
 

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