What changes

Language change happens at every level:

• Lexical — new words in, old words out.
• Semantic — words shift meaning.
• Grammatical — structures and inflections change.
• Orthographic — spelling and punctuation standardise.
• Phonological — pronunciation shifts.

Context: printing, empire, science and technology have all driven change.

How the vocabulary grows

New words enter through several processes:

• Borrowing (ballet, bungalow), coinage (selfie).
• Compounding (laptop), blending (brunch), affixation (un- + follow).
• Conversion (to text, to google), clipping (advert), acronyms (radar).

Loss: words also become archaic and obsolete over time.

Name the process

How meanings change

Words keep their form but shift meaning:

• Broadening — meaning widens.
• Narrowing — meaning contracts (meat once meant any food).
• Amelioration — becomes more positive (nice once meant foolish).
• Pejoration — becomes more negative (silly once meant blessed).

Keep separate: broadening/narrowing (scope) vs amelioration/pejoration (value).

Which semantic change?

Sort each example to its type of change

Tap an example, then tap the process it illustrates.

Standardisation and Johnson 1755

Early spelling was highly variable. Standardisation was driven by:

• Caxton's printing press (from 1476) spreading fixed forms.
• Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) — a landmark codification of English.
• Prescriptive grammars and mass schooling.

Haugen described standardisation as selection, codification, elaboration and implementation.

Remember: Johnson's Dictionary, 1755 — recording usage, not inventing it.

Theories and attitudes

Explain both why change happens and how people react:

• Substratum — contact with other languages.
• Functional — language changes to meet needs.
• Random fluctuation (Postal) — change without a single cause.
• Wave and S-curve models — how change spreads.

Jean Aitchison rejected decline narratives, naming three prescriptivist metaphors: the damp spoon (laziness), the crumbling castle (a mythical perfect past) and the infectious disease (usage is caught). The wider debate is prescriptivism vs descriptivism.

Attribute: the three metaphors describe attitudes Aitchison rejects.

Whose metaphor?

Match term to definition

Tap a term on the left, then its definition on the right.

The big ideas to take away

You can now explain how and why English changes, and evaluate attitudes to it. Press Finish to see your score.