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Image credit: Andrew De Leon, Unsplash |
By Lilian H. Hill
All languages change. The English we speak today is very different from the English of the past. The way words are pronounced and spelled can change. The meaning of some words has changed over time. New words are added to the language on a regular basis. For example, among new words in 2023, The Oxford English Dictionary added “porch pirate,” “deepfake,” and “antigodlin” (meaning something that is diagonal or askew) (Gutoskey, 2023).
Borrowing Words from Other Cultures
One way that languages change is by exposure to other languages. When people speaking different languages come in contact, they often ‘borrow’ words from each other (Anderson, 2018; Boyle, 2019). Good examples include words in English that came from other languages including croissant from French, karaoke from Japanese, avatar from Sanskrit, and loot from Hindi. Likewise, English words are used by speakers of other languages. You may have listened to a conversation in a language you don’t know and been surprised when you recognize a word or two, and then realized the people having the conversation are mixing in English words.
Now that we are a global economy, more frequent word borrowing is occurring and words from many other countries are being adopted in English, including words from China, Japan, Latin American countries, and African countries. Sometimes words go back and forth between cultures. For example, the word “anime” was coined in Japan, but was originally based on the English word animation. Now we use the word anime to describe hand-drawn and computer animation originating, or designed to look like it, from Japan. When a word is adopted into English the word may transform its sound, spelling, or meaning.
How Words Enter Dictionaries
Lexicographers, people who create dictionaries, pay attention to how people use words. Their job is not to decide on the meaning of words or to decide which words are “good” or “bad.” Instead, they continually learn about new words by observing the ways that people employ language. When a new word usage becomes common, it can be added to the dictionary. Likewise, briefly popular words that fall out of common use may be removed in future editions (Anderson, 2018; Boyle, 2019).
Dictionaries are not an authority that exists outside of human control. Rather, they are created by human beings just like us. That means dictionaries have flaws and that they can change in response to how people use language daily. Like many other processes, online dictionaries are now in common use, and we are less likely to purchase them in printed form.
Regional Variations and Dialects
Even within the same language, there are variations in pronunciation and meaning of words used by people living in different times. If you studied a Shakespeare play, Beowulf, or read Chaucer (2023) in the original language during college you will be familiar with how different the language was in the past. For example, “Ful wys is he that kan himselven knowe” (from The Monk's Tale, one of 24 stories in Canterbury Tales published between 1387–1400) can be translated to “A wise person knows himself.” (Gender-neutral language was clearly not used during Chaucer’s time). You can guess some of the words in this quotation, but the spelling and even the sentence structure are unfamiliar today.
Language also varies by location. Think of how differently English sounds in Canada, Britain, Australia, the U.S., India or Africa. There are regional differences in the ways that English is used in different locations of the U.S. such as New York City, Boston, and Atlanta. There are even variations used within single cities or regions. The accents in each city are distinctive and they are different dialects of the same language. You may be able to detect what part of a city someone comes from by the way they speak. A dialect is a regional variation of a language that has distinct pronunciations, grammar, and vocabulary. Instead of a single way to speak, write, and read English called American Standard English, linguists now recognize multiple dialects and ways of speaking (McWhorter, 2016).
One reason for this variation is that people in these locations have different experiences and need words that describe them. When I moved from Canada to Florida, I was given a small humor book titled, How to Speak Southern by Steve Mitchell (1976). Some words are unique to the South, such as “fixin to,” (meaning planning to do something) or “mash the button” (meaning to push a button). Other words were explanations of pronunciations that differ from the way things are said in another region and some were words that are run together in pronunciations. For example, “jeet yet?” is a way of saying did you eat yet? There are other regional books of this nature.
People speaking different dialects of the same language can usually understand each other and converse. Therefore, it is tempting to define the difference between a single language language and multiple dialects as being rooted in mutual intelligibility. Yet, there are dialects of English I’ve encountered that were very difficult to understand. Another point of clarification may revolve around the written form. We expect to see standard English used in books, journals, magazines, and government communications. In contrast, regional variations, when they do make it in print, are often found in quotation marks. Despite the difficulty of differentiating language and dialect, it is clear that there is a need for both terms so they will persist over time (McWhorter, 2016).
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