Frequency Effects And Language Change

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: Historical Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Concise overview over different mechanisms in the sphere of Language change.

English is looking back onto a long and rich history of development. Being part of the Indo-European language family, the origins of the language could be argued to date back as much as 6000 years. However, most scholars seem to agree that the ¿true¿, traceable genesis of English starts somewhere around the time of the Anglo-Saxon migration to the British Isles in in the fifth century CE. Thus, English can be understood as part of the Germanic language family tree. Today, only a relatively small part of the lexicon of English still reflects this beginning, as, over the course of many centuries, the language underwent a multitude of internally, externally and extra-linguistically motivated changes. Some followed major historical events such as the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the subsequently existing French influences or the Middle Ages and renaissance, which brought with them a great emphasis on Latin. While these mainly influenced the lexicon of English through loanwords, other developments, such as Sound Shifts (most notably the First Sound Shift, which is described by Grimm¿s Law that illustrates the differences between Germanic and other Indo-European languages), or the transition from Old English as an inflectional language to Middle English becoming an isolating or analytic language, had lasting influences on every major linguistic field of English.