language change essay questions

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Is language change good or bad?

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This chapter addresses the question, is language change good or bad? The conclusion is that language change in and of itself is neither good nor bad. It can sometimes have beneficial aspects, such as facilitating pronunciation or comprehension, and it can sometimes have detrimental consequences, sometimes creating a greater burden for comprehension and language learning. The mostly negative popular attitudes towards change in language are discussed. Kinds of language change are addressed, with attention in particular to the kinds of change that people notice most often. Claims about why languages change are considered. The question of whether language change is good or bad is restricted here to whether it is good or bad for purposes of communication. The fact that particular changes can be good for some aspects of language and bad for others is explained and exemplified. The interchange of sound change and analogy is also explained and exemplified. The role of sociolinguistic judgements of prestige and stigma are clarified.

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AP English Language and Composition Exam Questions

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Language Change

Reason for language change

• Individuals – Chaucer and Shakespeare
• Technology – Internet etc needing new lexis
• Society – Cultural changes and shifts in attitudes requiring new lexis E.g. Political Correctness
• Foreign Influence – E.g. America through film or trade
• Science – new inventions requiring new lexis
• Travel, trade and colonisation – require new lexis and shared lexis to barter and trade
• Globalisation – English becoming language of trade and business – new forms created (Spanglish)

Political Correctness

• Refrain from causing emotional harm
• Fit into society free of isolation
• However – gone to far - ‘vertically challenged’

Attitudes towards language change

• Prescriptivism – dictate how language should be used
• Want language to remain same and refrain from change
• Descriptivism – accept language change is inevitable and accept change
• David Crystal – 3 rd way – results in more creative and expressive form of language
• Used for comedic effect
• Convergence or divergence – conform to more dialectical lexis to fit in or show separate from others
• Used as filler or to show pain and displeasure
• Negative views towards taboo
• Too much on TV
• However, shows reality to modern language in Britain

Lexical change – neologisms

Words from other languages

Borrowings –

• Loans taken from foreign languages 
• E.g. ‘Judge’ from French and ‘Opera’ from Latin

Words formed from existing words - 

Affixation –

• Adding affix (prefix or suffix) to an existing word - E.g. ‘Racism’ and ‘sexism’

Compounding –

• Two words are combined in their entirety to make a new word
• E.g. ‘Lap-top’ and ‘Happy-hour’
• Two words parts are moulded together to form a new word, usually by adding the start of one word and the end of another
• E.g. ‘Smog’ – smoke and fog and ‘Motel’ – motor and hotel

Conversion –

• Changing of word class  - E.g. Noun to verb – ‘Text’ was noun now verb of ‘to text’

Words formed by shortening –

Shortening or abbreviation –

• Clipping part of a word
• E.g. Omnibus to ‘bus’ and Public house to ‘pub’
• Taking initial letters of words and making them into a combination of pronounceable as a new word
• E.g. NATO, NASA, AIDS, WAG

Initialism –

• Words abbreviated to initial letter - E.g. B.B.C, F.B.I, U.S.A.

Words from proper names –

• Derived from names or places synonymous with the product
• Denim – place in France
• Sandwich – after Earl of Sandwich

Semantic change

Broadening or generalisation –

• Meaning of a word broadens so as it retains old meaning but takes on new meanings as well
• E.g. ‘Mouse’ – was animal now computer equipment also

Narrowing or specialisation –

• Is the opposite of broadening
• Applies when word becomes more specific in its meaning, but again can retain the original meaning as well
• E.g. ‘Meat’ – meant all food now flesh of animals
• ‘Girl’ – middle ages meant all young people

Amelioration –

• Word has taken on a more pleasant or positive meaning than originally held
• E.g. ‘Wicked’ – still means evil now modern slang of good
• ‘Pretty’ – middle ages meant sly or cunning now beautiful

Pejoration –

• Opposite to amelioration
• words original meaning becomes less favourable
• E.g. ‘awful’ – originally 'worthy of awe' now 'exceedingly bad'
• Words take on new meanings when begin to be used metaphorically
• E.g. ‘Cow’ – bitchy female and ‘Catty’ – female
• Formed from existing words but assume new meanings often as fixed frame forms
• Can only be properly interpreted by learning what the whole frame means
• E.g. ‘In the dog house’ and ‘Over the moon’

Euphemisms –

• Polite way of describing something unpleasant, embarrassing or socially undesirable
• More politically correct
• E.g. ‘Friendly fire’ and ‘Passed away’

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How and Why Language Changes

This post was written by Mark Davies, HC Fellow, Linguistics Department

Why do languages change? The answers that some linguists tended to give 100-150 years ago strike us as being quite absurd nowadays. For example, they sometimes looked to the physical environment as a motivation for language change, such as the fact that the Germanic peoples in the Alps in 2000-3000 BC huffed and puffed so much as they were going up and down the mountains that they turned the “stops” (p, t, k) from Proto-Indo-European (spoken about 3000-5000 BC) into “fricatives” (f, th, h; a change known as Grimms Law), as in [p]a[t]er > [f]a[th]er, [t]res > [th]ree, [c]ornu (copia); “horn of plenty”) > [h]orn, etc. No one would suggest that as a motivation nowadays.

During the last 100 years or so, there have been two major camps when it comes to language change. The first are “structuralists” and “typologists”, who see internal motivations for change in the language. The other are “sociolinguists”, who see external / social motivations for change.

As noted, structuralists emphasize the role of competing factors in a language as a motivation for change. To give a concrete example, standard Spanish distinguishes between the two verb forms ( tú ) tiene / s / (“you have”; informal) and ( usted ) tiene /-/ (“you have”; more formal). In most varieties of Spanish, it’s not necessary to use a subject pronoun ( tú / usted ), because the verb ending already indicates who the subject is. But in some varieties of Spanish like Puerto Rico, the final /s/ is often lost, leading to the same form for both informal and formal: tiene /-/. In these varieties, the subject pronoun is almost obligatory (as it is in English), to compensate for the loss of the verb ending, and to let us know who we’re talking about. (Something similar happened in English between about 1000 and 1500 AD).

The preceding is an example of the interplay between phonology (sounds), morphology (word forms), and syntax. Sometimes there is also interplay between semantics (meaning) and word forms. For example, if someone says “My wife is so hot; I need to get her a drink”, there is an awkward ambiguity between the two meanings of hot (at least since the early 1990s). While such ambiguity can be tolerated for some time, there are often limits, such as the ambiguity of gay (= “happy”, or sexual orientation) being resolved with the loss of gay = “happy” in the 1950s-1970s.

As mentioned, the second major group of historical linguists focus on social motivations for change. This is something that really began to be studied systematically in the 1960s, and it was pioneered by the sociolinguist William Labov. To give a concrete example, Labov noticed that some people on the island of Martha’s Vineyard pronounced words like light and house with an intervening “schwa” sound, as in /l- uh -ite/ and /h- uh -oose/. It turns out that this was a “phonetic marker” that showed that these speakers identified with Martha’s Vineyard as it used to be, before the influx of rich “out-of-towners” from the mainland, who were running up the price of land. And when he studied this phenomenon in the early 1960s, such use appeared to be on the increase, as more and more people were being squeezed out of their ancestral farmlands on Martha’s Vineyard. Since the 1960s, sociolinguists and historical linguists have found hundreds of other interesting examples of how group identification can affect the adoption (or non-adoption) of linguistic features, much the same way that groups of people adopt new styles in clothing or hairstyles.

The two schools of “structurally-motivated change” and “socially-motivated change” might seem to be at odds with each other. In the first case, the “invisible hand” of language is moving things along to keep language understandable and workable. In the second case, change seems to be as random and unpredictable as the most recent changes in fashion (bell-bottoms in the 1960s, preppy clothes in the 1980s, or the Kardashians in the 2010s; ouch!). But careful research has shown that often there is interesting interplay between the two types of motivations. The invisible hand of language change (structurally-motivated change) can create an environment for change, which is then helped along by a certain social group adopting that change, and using it as a social marker.

I’m a historical linguist, and I’m fascinated by how and why language changes. But I’m also a corpus linguist, meaning that I use large collections of texts to see what’s going on in the language. I’ve created some of the largest historical corpora of English, such as the Corpus of Historical American English (400 million words, 1810s-2000s) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (520 million words, 1990-2015). Both of these corpora (and many more; see http://corpus.byu.edu ) can be used to look at language change 15 or 150 years ago.

But I’m also fascinated by what’s going on in the language right now – this week; this month – and how that affects (and is affected by) longer term changes in the language, which often take place over decades and even centuries. To look at changes right now, I’ve created a corpus called NOW (News on the Web; http://corpus.byu.edu/now/ ). It grows by about 5-6 million words each day (or about 150 million words each month, or 1.8 billion words each year). With this corpus, researchers can look at the creation and spread of new words ( Brexit, gig economy, normcore, precariat , etc) and see how current events are affecting the language. Or they can look at syntactic change (e.g. the ever-increasing rise in the like construction, “ and he’s like the most awesome guy I’ve like ever gone out with, like for real” ), morphological change (new words with the “scandal” suffix gate, e.g. deflategate , or Russiagate ), or semantic change (new uses for existing words, e.g. trigger warning, green tech or astroturfing ).

By spending time “in the trenches” with the language – day by day – we can gain insight into longer-range trends and changes. And in turn, this allows us to amass large amounts of data that can help to answer basic questions about how and why languages change.

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Essays About Language: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Language is the key to expressive communication; let our essay examples and writing prompts inspire you if you are writing essays about language.

When we communicate with one another, we use a system called language. It mainly consists of words, which, when combined, form phrases and sentences we use to talk to one another. However, some forms of language do not require written or verbal communication, such as sign language. 

Language can also refer to how we write or say things. For example, we can speak to friends using colloquial expressions and slang, while academic writing demands precise, formal language. Language is a complex concept with many meanings; discover the secrets of language in our informative guide.

5 Top Essay Examples

1. a global language: english language by dallas ryan , 2. language and its importance to society by shelly shah, 3. language: the essence of culture by kelsey holmes.

• 4.  Foreign Language Speech by Sophie Carson
• 5. ​​Attitudes to Language by Kurt Medina

1. My Native Language

2. the advantages of bilingualism, 3. language and technology, 4. why language matters, 5. slang and communication, 6. english is the official language of the u.s..

“Furthermore, using English, people can have more friends, widen peer relationships with foreigners and can not get lost. Overall, English becomes a global language; people may have more chances in communication. Another crucial advantage is improving business. If English was spoken widespread and everyone could use it, they would likely have more opportunities in business. Foreign investments from rich countries might be supported to the poorer countries.”

In this essay, Ryan enumerates both the advantages and disadvantages of using English; it seems that Ryan proposes uniting the world under the English language. English, a well-known and commonly-spoken language can help people to communicate better, which can foster better connections with one another. However, people would lose their native language and promote a specific culture rather than diversity. Ultimately, Ryan believes that English is a “global language,” and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages

“Language is a constituent element of civilization. It raised man from a savage state to the plane which he was capable of reaching. Man could not become man except by language. An essential point in which man differs from animals is that man alone is the sole possessor of language. No doubt animals also exhibit certain degree of power of communication but that is not only inferior in degree to human language, but also radically diverse in kind from it.”

Shah writes about the meaning of language, its role in society, and its place as an institution serving the purposes of the people using it. Most importantly, she writes about why it is necessary; the way we communicate through language separates us as humans from all other living things. It also carries individual culture and allows one to convey their thoughts. You might find our list of TOEFL writing topics helpful.

“Cultural identity is heavily dependent on a number of factors including ethnicity, gender, geographic location, religion, language, and so much more.  Culture is defined as a “historically transmitted system of symbols, meanings, and norms.”  Knowing a language automatically enables someone to identify with others who speak the same language.  This connection is such an important part of cultural exchange”

In this short essay, Homes discusses how language reflects a person’s cultural identity and the importance of communication in a civilized society. Different communities and cultures use specific sounds and understand their meanings to communicate. From this, writing was developed. Knowing a language makes connecting with others of the same culture easier. 

4.   Foreign Language Speech by Sophie Carson

“Ultimately, learning a foreign language will improve a child’s overall thinking and learning skills in general, making them smarter in many different unrelated areas. Their creativity is highly improved as they are more trained to look at problems from different angles and think outside of the box. This flexible thinking makes them better problem solvers since they can see problems from different perspectives. The better thinking skills developed from learning a foreign language have also been seen through testing scores.”

Carson writes about some of the benefits of learning a foreign language, especially during childhood. During childhood, the brain is more flexible, and it is easier for one to learn a new language in their younger years. Among many other benefits, bilingualism has been shown to improve memory and open up more parts of a child’s brain, helping them hone their critical thinking skills. Teaching children a foreign language makes them more aware of the world around them and can open up opportunities in the future.

5. ​​ Attitudes to Language by Kurt Medina

“Increasingly, educators are becoming aware that a person’s native language is an integral part of who that person is and marginalizing the language can have severe damaging effects on that person’s psyche. Many linguists consistently make a case for teaching native languages alongside the target languages so that children can clearly differentiate among the codes”

As its title suggests, Medina’s essay revolves around different attitudes towards types of language, whether it be vernacular language or dialects. He discusses this in the context of Caribbean cultures, where different dialects and languages are widespread, and people switch between languages quickly. Medina mentions how we tend to modify the language we use in different situations, depending on how formal or informal we need to be. 

6 Prompts for Essays About Language

In your essay, you can write about your native language. For example, explain how it originated and some of its characteristics. Write about why you are proud of it or persuade others to try learning it. To add depth to your essay, include a section with common phrases or idioms from your native language and explain their meaning.

Bilingualism has been said to enhance a whole range of cognitive skills, from a longer attention span to better memory. Look into the different advantages of speaking two or more languages, and use these to promote bilingualism. Cite scientific research papers and reference their findings in your essay for a compelling piece of writing.

In the 21st century, the development of new technology has blurred the lines between communication and isolation; it has undoubtedly changed how we interact and use language. For example, many words have been replaced in day-to-day communication by texting lingo and slang. In addition, technology has made us communicate more virtually and non-verbally. Research and discuss how the 21st century has changed how we interact and “do language” worldwide, whether it has improved or worsened. 

We often change how we speak depending on the situation; we use different words and expressions. Why do we do this? Based on a combination of personal experience and research, reflect on why it is essential to use appropriate language in different scenarios.

Different cultures use different forms of slang. Slang is a type of language consisting of informal words and expressions. Some hold negative views towards slang, saying that it degrades the language system, while others believe it allows people to express their culture. Write about whether you believe slang should be acceptable or not: defend your position by giving evidence either that slang is detrimental to language or that it poses no threat.

English is the most spoken language in the United States and is used in government documents; it is all but the country’s official language. Do you believe the government should finally declare English the country’s official language? Research the viewpoints of both sides and form a conclusion; support your argument with sufficient details and research. 

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our guide on how to write an essay about diversity .

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Practice paper 2 questions.

What do Paper 2 exams look like? The document below shows several Paper 2-style questions. Feel free to 'make a copy' of these Google Docs and edit them for your own purposes. These questions were inspired by colleagues and past papers. They are not 'official' in any way and are intended for in-school practice and guidance. There are no marking notes or suggested answers. 

Study the questions in the Practice Paper 2s. What kinds of trends and patterns do you notice? If you were to make a prediction about the kinds of questions that will appear on this year's exam, what would you predict?

Compare the questions from the Practice Paper 2s to the Areas of Exploration. How are they similar or different? Check out the page on the 7 concepts from this course. How do these questions encourage you to explore these concepts ?

The Practice Paper 2s consist of four questions. Actual IB Paper 2 may not be organised this way, but these practiced questions are designed to help you prepare for the following types of questions: 

The first question is about a stylistic or structural feature. These types of questions lend themselves well to Criterion B: analysis and evaluation. If the feature is about 'narrative perspective', for example, you may want to write body paragraphs on related features, such as flashbacks, dialogue and characterisation. As always, connect form to meaning, while answering the question. 

The second question is intentionally difficult. The IB has been known to include questions that require deeper understanding of literature and contexts. Questions about how the meaning of a work has evolved over time or how the author 's life has influenced the work are difficult (if not impossible) to answer. If you do not feel confident exploring answering these types of questions, avoid them! 

The third question is often about some kind of conflict or struggle. These struggles may be between competing concepts , such as 'new' and 'old', or juxtaposed settings, like 'rural' and 'urban', or characters, such as 'men' and 'women'. As you prepare your works, consider conflict, paradox and juxtaposition. You may be able to do something with these ideas or your Paper 2 response. 

The fourth question in these Practice Paper 2 questions relates to an abstract concept, such as justice, faith, home, wealth or identity. These may or may not be related to one of the 7 concepts from the course: identity, communication, creativity, representation, transformation, perspective or culture. Discussing literary works in relation to these concepts is good preparation for Paper 2. 

Even though you will not know the essay questions before the exam, you can still prepare for the exam. You can practice connecting works, by making diagrams like the diagram on this page . You can practice unpacking P2 questions , using activities like the one on this page . You'll notice on both pages that novels, plays and graphic novels tend to work well for Paper 2 responses, as question often ask about setting, events, characters, conflicts and other literary features of these literary forms. 

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• Paper 2 example: The Great Gatsby and The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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A Level English Language Essay Response - Language Change

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

10 July 2022

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