Attitudes Towards Language Change: Interviews and Opinions, Ejercicios de Idioma Inglés

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ATTITUDES TOWARDS

LANGUAGE CHANGE

TASK 1

JAIME MUNIESA ROBLES

GROUP 310 CAMBIO Y VARIACION I

Task 1 is worth 1,5 points, it should be submitted in groups of 2-3 students and is due October 15. Contact your lecturer for any questions, issues, etc. you come across throughout the process.

1. Ask your friends and family what they think about language today: if they think it is changing, and if so, if is it getting better or worse? Which changes they like, which not. Include their answers in a table and add age and gender. Analyse 4-5 subjects for each group member. Can you find any patterns related to age or gender? Don’t forget to add a paragraph summarizing your findings and relating them to the course session. [0,5 points] People these days use to disagree in terms of what they believe about whether a language changes and whether it is good or bad for a community or a language. Taking this into account, I have done some interviews with 5 people of different ages and generations. Some of them belong to different social classes. NAME AGE GENDER IÑIGO Mother tongue: Spanish The opinion of Iñigo seems to be like Teresa’s one. He also talks about the importance of the written language that is has been changing since the new technological era. Some words, in Spanish, such as “Usted” lately, people used to write “Ud.” Instead of “usted “. Also, Iñigo does not see any problem if Spanish introduce English borrowings, he knows that language is evolving and that is a way to increase our vocabulary.

53 MALE

ENRIQUE

mother tongue: Spanish Enrique´s opinion of language change is very opposite to the others. he stands on the importance of borrowing new words from other languages and the substitution of those old words with some adapted ones to our new times, but he also emphasizes that we should educate our language first by trying not to accept words such as “Cocreta, Mondarina, Almondiga” because he thinks that this is the real problem of a language.

20 MALE

GONZALO

Mother tongue: Spanish Gonzalo´s reply to the following answers tells us the main difference between these two main clauses. in fact, he establishes that the language is changing because there exists a necessity for the languages to remove or to actualise the main topics of the main world and the actuality of the world. if we improve the word vocabulary with new own words, the lexicon would be increased as one. Unfortunately, variation changes do not evolve so quickly to be seen, it is a large process of evolution and processes.

25 MALE

TERESA 50 FEMALE

2. Look for recent examples of language manipulation or language change promotion in English or your mother tongues and comment on the linguistic strategies being used and on their implications for society. [0,5 points] Considering the opinions collected in the first exercise, we will first begin to talk about how linguistic strategies come to manipulate and even alter the use of a language. Since we consider that the change of language is an inevitable process and that with the passage of time a language changes, I would like to be able to clarify what they are in my opinion and in the opinions that I have gathered from the subjects to whom I have interviewee, the linguistic strategies that are most important when manipulating a language. I would like to be able to clarify that the example with which I am going to continue is with the Spanish language. We find processes such as neologisms, loanwords, pidginization, etc. All of these alter the use of language in some way. obviously, there are processes that last a long time, but they are still the manipulation of a language. According to the previous activity, many of the people interviewed agreed that one of the most used linguistic strategies is loanwords such as What else alters a language. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021) For example, in the Spanish language, we can find thousands of loanwords: Parking (adapted foreigners). ... Chalet (adapted foreigners). ... Eau de parfum (unadapted foreignness). ... Hardware (unadapted foreignness). ... Holding (unadapted foreignness). ... Happy hour (semantic tracing). ... Stalkear (adapted foreignism). ... Iron curtain (semantic tracing). Most of them come in English or French, and as time progresses, more loans reach the Spanish language. This can be seen as a process that deteriorates a language since adopting new words instead of creating your own words represents a “danger” for any language. (Stosic, 2014) 3. Relate your findings to what we have discussed in class (+ Aitchison’s chapters) on attitudes and how languages change in about 500 words. [0,5 points]

The main aspects of language change are so, start with, it is unavoidable, and a natural process. It varies according to the necessities of the population (psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors). However, linguists wonder if all these changes make language progress or decay. Is language really progressing or decaying? There is no clear answer for this since there are different opinions: on the one hand, the conservative people see it as negative (that slang and the youngsters’ communication is a deterioration of language in itself). On the other hand, there exists the idea that language cannot be decaying because it must adapt to the necessities of the population. There are linguists who claim language is moving towards a state of perfection: language is nowadays able to transmit more with fewer words. Furthermore, technologies and the evolution of society that has made language as depraved as it is nowadays. Besides, language change could be negative if varieties of a concrete language evolve independently. The consequence would be unintelligibility between speakers. Then, the imposition of a standard form for communication to be still possible is presented by linguistics. In my view, I consider that the languages are evolving. I think it is due to the development of society being able to say a wider range of things that are in our human experience such as situations, feelings, etc…). Furthermore, if we figure it out, we realize that vocabulary has been upgraded. That might be the reason for the invention of computers, the Internet and all the terms and concepts related to it. Society has made these terms appear: Don’t forget to WhatsApp me. The verb “Whatsapp” is nowadays accepted by Dictionaries. Moreover, the use of informal language is increasing very fast. In fact, there is a current Urban dictionary online where we have access to all these new “relaxing words”. There are also phonological changes, like the delusion of intervocalic /d/ in Spanish past participles: “cantado” becomes “cantao”. In my opinion, I believe that this economization of language is positive because it shows that language is adapting to the necessities of speakers. It does not mean that speakers are lazy or vague enough to pronounce words, but that if the sentence is meaningful and understandable, why should be complaining about it? I think that this is a natural and necessary process for a language.