Why Does Language Drift Happen?

[Crichax]

Who on Earth would want to change their whole vocabulary and way of speaking (and how did they get their way)? If we lived in a sane world, we would all be speaking Old English.

 

[shapelesswaste]

Why does any system evolve? I think your question hits something deeper than just language, but I don't have a simple answer for you.

 

[IV 445]

There’s the biblical story about the Tower of Babel. Can you imagine how dull and boring a world with only one language and one culture would be?

 

[Lemmingwise]

I agree, but why english? Certainly the french would never agree. It's best to create a new language altogether that we all have to learn, so we're on even feet. Maybe call it esperanto. Shit! That's already been done before? And it wasn't a success? Must have been something wrong with that language. We'll start over and do it right this time.

 

[The Manglement]

The answer is that nobody really knows how language works, and it's just a bunch of people winging it. Convince a bunch of retarded, drunk, dirt-farming peasants that a word or sound is pronounced a certain way, and it magically is because language is just a consensus. Realize that a literal 1st grader has a deeper understanding of the English language than most people for most of human history. Add to that the fact that for a thousand years English was not really used as a written language, and you have a situation where people have no idea how to speak English the 'right' way and no idea how it was spoken 50 years ago or is spoken a hundred miles away.

 

[Coach Kreeton Of All That]

Simple answer: autism.

Long answer: As humans reproduce, pass on information and knowledge to the next generation, things get lost in context because that generation lacks what the previous one had nor experienced the same exact things or made the same exact choices and so forth. So that new generation will interact with a completely different environment and setting of people, unless they're somehow isolated and only allowed outside their boundaries for a small bit of time, then language will change.

Going to give vague examples of greetings from past generations with the term Boomer and responses from post-boomers towards their folks.
Might be a bit dated from notes:

Boomers of then: How are you? >> Fuck off faggit
Next Boomers: Hey, sup? >> Fuck off faggit
Boomers Later: We good? >> Fuck off faggit
Boomers After: How we doing, yo? >> Fuck off faggit
CURRENT YEAR Boomers: (Insert whatever) >> Cool Story, Bro*

*That was the response all along

That was so much autism typed, I hope OP understands.

 

[Prince Jello]

Time, education/class, geographical distance, contact with other languages. My brother is more fluent in English than I am, but he doesn't read as much, so even in our first language, he sometimes doesn't know the origin of some expressions. As a result, we don't speak the same way.

In a larger scale, isolated populations and social classes share a vocabulary and a number of expressions/specific wordings that reflect their experience and way of living. A fisherman knows certain words that a nobleman probably won't understand or has never heard before. Inuit people have several words (about thirty or so, if I recall correctly) to refer to snow, because their world and culture are shaped by it. In comparison, people who live in a warmer climate don't need that many words for a phenomenon they seldom encounter.

 

[Mender Bug]

Because it's a tool and as people's need for it changes they change it. But also in the case of English it changes because it absorbs traits from other languages it comes into contact with. In the case of English most words are loanwords. Some of these loanwords have been in English for so long that they aren't even thought of as foreign, like many of the Scandinavian words like "kid", "they", and "there".

 

[Richardo Retardo]

Who on Earth would want to change their whole vocabulary and way of speaking

It almost never works that way. Language change is a slow process that is almost always caused by (often violent) interaction with other ethnic groups. The primary reason that English had such a radical change was because our entire ruling class was replaced (not for the first time either) by vulgar Franco-latin speaking Normans in the 11th century and Norman became the prestige language.
There are a few cases of people willingly stopping to use their native tongue (such as the Ajawa language of Nigeria) but those are almost always due to economic pressures or government homogenization/"education" campaigns. But, If an ethnic group has no pressures to change their language they typically will change it very little especially in regards to the written form - The Old Norse of Iceland that is still relatively intelligible with modern Icelandic over a 1000 years later is a good example of that.

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

If we lived in a sane world, we would all be speaking Old English.

*Proto-Indo-European

if we lived in a sane world all of europe would be speaking german for the last 70 years

That's what people in Imperial Germany (Nazis-light) thought before World War I, and arguably, it could have happened if the evil powers would have won that war. Somebody tried to develope a conlang based on Standard German, Wede.

There’s the biblical story about the Tower of Babel. Can you imagine how dull and boring a world with only one language and one culture would be?

In Medieval Europe, linguists thought that all languages developed from Hebrew. Together with Latin and Greek, those were the three "noble tongues".

 

[Crichax]

*Proto-Indo-European


That's what people in Imperial Germany (Nazis-light) thought before World War I, and arguably, it could have happened if the evil powers would have won that war. Somebody tried to develope a conlang based on Standard German, Wede.


In Medieval Europe, linguists thought that all languages developed from Hebrew. Together with Latin and Greek, those were the three "noble tongues".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we would be speaking Old English in my hypothetical world.

PIE would be spoken by Europeans on the mainland.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we would be speaking Old English in my hypothetical world.

PIE would be spoken by Europeans on the mainland.

Old English is a West Germanic language and therefore a subset of Indo-European. Old Germanic may or may not have been the result of PIE conquest of non-Indo-European people since a lot of core words like blood that don't normally vary are different from every other Indo-European language, but its character is still predominantly Indo-European.

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

Old English is a West Germanic language and therefore a subset of Indo-European. Old Germanic may or may not have been the result of PIE conquest of non-Indo-European people since a lot of core words like blood that don't normally vary are different from every other Indo-European language, but its character is still predominantly Indo-European.

English has become very analytic and abandoned most flexion. In terms of grammar and complexity, there is a huge leap between English and all languages in continental Europe. Though, the other Germanic languages, except Icelandic and German, have also lost a large amount of grammatical and morphological complexity and move away from synthetism.

Besides, on the internet, when I know somebody is from a non-Anglophone country, sometimes I read his or her postings with a voice that has a stereotypical accent. Is that racist?

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Those are all improvements. The less changed a language is from its roots the more bullshit complex it seems to be. If we just switched to phonetic spelling English would be a perfect language.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

Language change is basically a long bizarre trend towards further simplicity compounded by the occasional violent change in flow from a large scale event which ironically creates new features as a result. As time goes on, tenses are lost, precision gives way to context, and sounds themselves are modified and shifted to fit new meanings. Its It's like if streamlining a video game worked as advertised.

 

[Malagor the dank omen]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we would be speaking Old English in my hypothetical world.

PIE would be spoken by Europeans on the mainland.

Funnily enough, people actually like when i say things like "Overyonder" or "Cheerio" as if it was nobody's business.

Language change is basically a long bizarre trend towards further simplicity compounded by the occasional violent change in flow from a large scale event which ironically creates new features as a result. As time goes on, tenses are lost, precision gives way to context, and sounds themselves are modified and shifted to fit new meanings. Its It's like if streamlining a video game worked as advertised.

Also, you gotta have in mind when new stuff happens/appears in the form of new technologies, social interactions and the such. We humans are coming up with new stuff by the day and we need new words to define such things. Luckly, we don't have the problem scientists had back in the day when there were so many discoveries that they couldn't name all of them.

And there is also the matter of regional accent, slang and all that shit. If not, look at the comparison of Spanish between South America and Spain, because on the surface level they are the same but once you dig a bit deeper, you will see there are a lot of differences.

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

Those are all improvements.

Why? In fact, some things like genders and cases and conjugations have many advantages.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Why? In fact, some things like genders and cases and conjugations have many advantages.

Case endings and etc can be useful but grammatical gender is just arbitrary noise that adds complexity for no gain. Why the fuck is a door feminine? That's not even getting into the bullshit African languages with genders for things that are long, or genders for natural things that aren't dogs.

 

[Aumis Graham]

From what I have read, languages at least in the PIE branch have been tending toward simplification, not becoming complicated, primarily because of interactions from groups, especially in the spheres of commerce and war.

Also, something that has always amused me is that you would imagine the reverse should happen, that language should get more complicated and bulky. Things such as case, grammatical gender, and conjugation should increase and cause wider diversification in languages, which has occurred since antiquity. Yet, we are starting to stagnate on the language front, especially with English learners trying to learn new languages. Now, even learning gender in german or french is a stretch for some people.

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

Case endings and etc can be useful but grammatical gender is just arbitrary noise that adds complexity for no gain. Why the fuck is a door feminine? That's not even getting into the bullshit African languages with genders for things that are long, or genders for natural things that aren't dogs.

Indonesian and Dutch have relatively free word order but no cases (anymore, for Dutch), but they really would be helpful for clarity.
Gender shows mostly in congruency, adjectives, pronouns, articles etc. have to agree with their headnoun in gender, e.g. by repeeting an ending. That too makes clearer which word relates to which in a sentence.

Now, even learning gender in german or french is a stretch for some people.

There are some (((native Nazis and Frogs))) who think that the gendered nouns thing is "sexist" (doubleplusunfeminist). As if demanding to be called with pronouns that sound like space alien names isn't enough, those want to rewrite core parts of grammar! Of course, people won't take commands on how to speak from anybody, that's not how language drift works.