Predicting language change + book on itch!
Greetings!
Amplitudes is out today!
Less exciting is that Amazon still hasn’t approved my tax forms, and the site I want to sell the ebook through doesn’t support epub3, only epub2, so that’s taking time to reformat completely. But in the meantime, you can get the epub3 version on my brand new itch.io site!
I will be at the 4th St. Fantasy Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, June 13-15. If you’re also there, say hello!
At the beginning of the month, I decided I’d write about why English spelling is so weird, and then I got hit by a whole lot of Life(™). That’s a topic that I need to look a few more things up for so I don’t tell you all any lies, so it’s on my to-do list now. (Short version: 1) historical reasons, 2) borrowing.)
Conveniently, I was inspired for an alternative topic when YouTube alerted me to a new video from Jackson Crawford, where he makes a few predictions about language change. I summarize them here, but feel free to click through. The video is 12 minutes.
What is language change?
Those of you who’ve already got your hands on Filling Your Worlds can read the fairly extensive chapter I wrote about how linguists study language change and what types of change there are. That’s the part of linguistics I find the most interesting, so I had a lot of things to say about it, but I’ll give you a brief run-down here.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of language change: sound change and lexical change. I talked about sound change briefly in June 2024, so click over if you need a refresher. We don’t know exactly why sound change happens, but it does happen, and any sound change that’s happened once can happen again. Sound change can have a social meaning, like I discussed somewhat in July 2024 and in November 2023. People can consciously or unconsciously choose to imitate the way people speak in the social group they want to belong to in order to signify their belonging — or speak differently from a group they don’t want to belong to in order to signify their rejection of this group. Sociology!
Side note: Sound change is one of the reasons English spelling makes no sense with the way things are currently pronounced. This falls under 1) historical reasons.
Lexical change is basically everything to do with words and vocabulary, from the coining of new words to older words getting different meanings, from words falling out of use to words being borrowed from another language.
Can we predict language change?
The answer I give in my book is no, but it’s also not that simple. Because the book is for writers who want to make up plausible language features for their writing, I give you some techniques you can use for that. You can take a look at ongoing trends and make a guess about which ones are going to stick around and how they might change in the future (which is technically making a prediction, yes), and then use that to make up your space-future slang if you so choose. And none of us has a time machine, so none of us will ever know if we were right. (Future linguists can check our predictions, though.)
So I watched Crawford’s video with interest, to see both what he said and how he made his predictions.
He makes one prediction about sound change (glottalization of the flapped /t d/ like in atom, which is already prevalent in working-class UK dialects and some dialects of US English, like di-int for didn’t.) I think that’s pretty plausible; I don’t personally have that feature, but several of my friends (younger and from New England, mostly) do. Is it a conscious imitation of British English? Could be; US-Americans have a fascination with our cousins across the pond and the way they talk and often think British accents sound “smarter.”
He predicts that whom will come back but not as the accusative form of who, rather as the nominative form. He suggests this is because people are aware that whom is associated with more “correctness” (which is often associated with “sounding smarter”) but they aren’t sure exactly what the actual distinction is. (Who is the subject of the sentence, like “Who said that?” and whom is the object, like “Whom did we see at the theater?”) That’s an interesting idea, and I don’t think I disagree. I don’t know if I entirely agree, but hypercorrection is how we got people thinking that “between you and I” is correct (it isn’t), so who’s to say?
As a long-time resident of tumblr, I absolutely have to mention the unholy creation whomst and whomst’d’ve, the origins of which are undoubtedly lost to tumblr’s nonfunctional search function (though Know Your Meme blames instagram and reddit). Tumblr uses whomst mainly as a mock-outrage marker (WHOMST DARES?!) and humorously (whomst among us has never thought this). (Honestly, sometimes I wish I were independently wealthy so I could just spend a month or two at a time chasing down fun theories like this. But no, I need to work to pay my rent.)
He talks about quotative BE LIKE, which I spend several pages on in my book (and have Feelings about, because the way it spread upended a lot of the theories about how lexical change spreads) and suggests that it will become the dominant way of reporting speech in the future, perhaps even in formal text. (Maybe I should write that article up next month, actually. That could be a good one, because it’s a really important study.) I think it’s already fully embedded in English, and it’s the primary way that speakers since Gen X (mid-1960s) report speech when speaking. (Formal writing is still said, but I’d bet you’d find a similar trend in informal writing, e.g., chat groups.) That and went. “He went UGH.”
One distinction Crawford isn’t aware of is that BE LIKE is mostly used (right now) to convey a general sense of things, as in “I was like UGH,” as opposed to direct verbatim quotes, but in the 40-odd years since BE LIKE was first mentioned in a linguistics journal, its usage has changed. I’ve heard (and said) things like “He was like come over and I was like no, I have work.” That still implies to me a paraphrase, but I don’t know what younger speakers’ opinions are.
The last thing he mentions is the development and spread of the adjectival suffix -y to be very generally “favorable to X, similar to X,” like his example “This is a very prairie-doggy environment.” Or “That guy is kinda douchey.” This type of thing is fascinating, because morphology is really cool, and modern speakers are just taking an existing adjectival suffix (like in hilly ‘full of hills’, wordy ‘excess of words’) and running with it. This is known as productivity, and the suffix wasn’t super productive before, but it wasn’t unproductive (like -th (tenth)), either. Sort of your average amount of word formations with it. So the suffix is salient (noticeable), and people were like “we can use that.” And they did.
The suffix -ize is also very productive right now, especially in corporate talk.
How can I use this in writing?
If you want to give your future space people (or whatever you’re writing about) a different way of talking, you can figure out what sort of changes might occur. Look at ongoing trends and pick one. (How do you find ongoing trends? Find some teenagers and twentysomethings. Go on tiktok or wherever the youths are hanging out these days. Pay attention to your friends and the way they talk.)
There are also some idiosyncratic language changes out there, so you could decide that Important Historical Figure X started using a particular feature, and then everyone else started using it to imitate them. (The importance of the figure could be on a large scale, like Atatürk replacing the Ottoman alphabet with the Roman one, or a smaller scale, like an underground figure or entertainer or the like having a particular usage and their fans picking it up as well. Gay voice is real.)
People want to sound smart and sound cool (or at least like the group they want to be “in” with). Young people want to sound different from their parents and like their friends. Fictional people will want these things, too. How far down that rabbit hole you want to go is entirely up to you.
Conveniently, I’ve written an entire book about this! Inconveniently, I’m having trouble getting it for sale on the interwebs. If itch isn’t for you, keep your eye on this space, because I will definitely inform you here when you can purchase the book on the usual distributors.
Thanks for reading! Until next time.
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