Language Change: Progress or Decay?

Why Languages Change over time?

The project that our linguists had been working on lately, and spent up to 30 hours on decoding the handwriting and timeworn words and phrases, was a translation from Polish into English of 60 years old document produced right after the end of the World War II. It was a description of the property, taken away from the owner and nationalized by the Soviets. Ordering the translation from Polish, the descendants were aiming to learn more about the history of the family and the fortunes of its members. However, no matter how hard they’ve tried, our translators from Polish failed to transcribe and translate about 15% of the document. The reason was that the document contained the words which are no longer in use.

So, why do languages change? Well, there’s been many theories about why languages transform. This has intrigued people since time is immemorial and it seems that practically everybody has an idea. One early example can be found in Bible in the form of the Tower of Babel, where God decided humans got a little too much hubris (oops…wrong mythology) and so made their lives difficult by giving everybody different languages.

Language Deterioration? Some argue that the 18th century view of language is one of decay and dissipation. The reasoning is that the old Indo – European languages like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and all have complex declension and conjugation schemes, whereas the modern Indo – European languages have far fewer cases for declension and conjugation. This “loss” of declension and conjugation cases was a result of speakers of the language getting increasingly unconcerned about their speech (read “lazy”), so the modern speakers are “decadent” as they have allowed the once complex language to decay into such a “modest” language.

Impact of modern technologies and fast – paced living? The next reason is that children wrongly learn the language of their parents. Let’s look at the extreme case of immigrants. What is observed is that children of immigrants almost always learn the language of their friends at school regardless of the parents’ dialect or original tongue. Which leads to unavoidable change of the language.

For example, let’s examine the popular nowadays “texting”: formerly 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, teenagers 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 Alex right now.

Hence, language changes for several reasons. First of all, it changes because the needs of its speakers change. New technologies, new products, and new experiences entail new words to refer to them clearly and efficiently. Language will never stop changing; it will endure to respond to the needs of the people who use it, and the next time you see or hear a new phrase that grates on your ears, remember that like everything else in nature, the language is a work in progress.