If you were to travel to the future, would you be able to understand what anyone was saying? What if you went back in time? Would the language be different enough to make communication impossible?
Daniel Siddiqi, the assistant director of the linguistics department at Carleton University, is a specialist of words and sentence structure. He says that if someone were to travel back in time 1,000 years, the language they would find would be incomprehensible.
“If you went back in time you wouldn’t be able to speak to anybody,” he says.
If the time traveller was less ambitious and travelled back in time only 500 years the language they would find would be much easier to understand, Siddiqi says. This is because it was around the year 1500 when people began to standardize language, he says.
Without standardized language, the spoken word changes very rapidly, Siddiqi says. But the written word is by nature resistant to change, and because of this, the evolution of the spoken word has slowed down over the last 500 years, he says.
Siddiqi says there were a couple of significant changes around the year 1500 that lead to the standardization of language.
Firstly, there was the printing press, which made the written word more popular and available to more people, he says.
Secondly, Siddiqi says, the rise of the middle class played a role in the standardization of language because of their feeling of upward mobility.
The middle class was always trying to do things the “right” way and they placed a lot of emphasis on the right way to speak and write, Siddiqi says.
Siddiqi says this created what is called the prescriptive tradition in the English language. From the years 1500-1700 people began making up rules for the English language and writing them down, many of which Siddiqi says are completely made up or borrowed from other languages.
“Before the prescriptive tradition it would have been normal to write exactly what you said,” Siddiqi says.
Inevitable change
Regardless of the prescriptive tradition, Siddiqi says we still change the way we speak to make speaking easier.
“We have a need when we are speaking to do it as fast as possible,” he says.
Siddiqi said the only thing that inhibits this is our wish to also be as clear as possible when we speak.
Because of this we are always fighting to make language as easy as possible and as fast as possible, he says.
In order to do this, Siddiqi says we tend to shorten grammatical words because their meaning is fairly predictable based on the context of the sentence.
For example, “I am going” has become “I’m gonna” to “Imma,” Siddiqi says.
Technological change
Natasha Artemeva, an associate applied linguistics professor at Carleton, says our speech also changes due to cultural and social factors.
She says the English language has adopted many new words over the past 20 years because of the technological boom and the creation of the Internet.
Words have had to be created for social media such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs, she says.
Artemeva says the meanings of some words have also changed because of technology.
For instance, the word “cloud” is now used to refer to a kind of mass storage on the Internet rather than just something fluffy and white in the sky.
Social and political factors also change the meaning of words, Artemeva says.
“We hardly ever use the word ‘queer’ to mean ‘strange,’ or ‘gay’ to mean ‘happy,’” she says.
“This is because of political, social, and sexual movements that have used these words differently.”
Some Canadian change
Lev Blumenfeld, the undergraduate adviser for Carleton’s School of Linguistics says that the pronunciation of words also change over time.
Blumenfeld says linguists are now studying a significant change in the way Canadians speak which they are calling the “Canadian Vowel Shift.”
He said Canadians have started to pronounce their vowels towards the back of the mouth and low on the tongue, while in contrast Americans pronounce their vowels in the front and at the top of the tongue.
“You can see the difference when you say ‘mad’ and ‘mam,’” Blumenfeld says.
Blumenfeld says the reason for this change is a huge mystery to linguists.
Some theorize that it is an effect of sociolinguistics, where groups of people use very subtle differences in their speech to signal their identity, but there is no way to know for sure, he says. The end result of changes to language such as the “Canadian Vowel Shift” is that eventually new languages are created. However, this takes thousands of years, Blumenfeld says.
Artemeva says no one should be upset about language change because it is natural and normal.
“It is important to realize that all languages are alive and like any live organisms, they change,” she says.
Many older people believe that the way younger generations are speaking is somehow corrupt, Artemeva says. However, as long as the people they are talking to understand them, there is no issue, she said.
Siddiqi says he feels much the same way about slang. Slang, he says, is just a new group of words that is foreign to a group of people and is not part of the standard language.
“Slang is just somebody saying, ‘we’re old and stodgy and we don’t like the way you young’ns talk,’” he says.
Siddiqi says eventually some of these words will become accepted in everyday speech, and the people who don’t want it to change will just have to deal with it.
