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Language Evolves

Each year, the American Dialect Society selects a “Word of the Year.” Recent winners include tweet, a “short, timely message sent via the Twitter.com service,” and app, “an abbreviated form of application, a software program for a computer or phone operating system.” Even the Oxford English Dictionary—the resource that defines the English language—annually announces what new terms have officially been added to the English vocabulary. In 2011, this included cyberbullying (“the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature”) and sexting (“the sending of sexually explicit photographs or messages via mobile phone”).

Many people view language as fixed. But in fact, language constantly changes. A particular language’s constitutive rules—which define the meanings of words—may shift. As time passes and technology changes, people add new words to their language (tweet, app, cyberbullying, sexting) and discard old ones. Sometimes people create new phrases, such as helicopter parent, that eventually see wide use. Other times, speakers of a language borrow words and phrases from other languages and incorporate them into their own.

Consider how English-speakers have borrowed from other languages: If you tell friends that you want to take a whirl around the United States, you’re using Norse (Viking) words, and if your trip takes you to Wisconsin, Oregon, and Wyoming, you’re visiting places with Native American names.² If you stop at a café and request a cup of tea along the way, you’re speaking Amoy (eastern China), but if you ask the waiter to spike your coffee with alcohol, you’re using Arabic. If, at the end of the trip, you express an eagerness to return to your job, you’re employing Breton (western France), but if you call in sick and tell your manager that you have influenza, you’re speaking Italian.

A language’s regulative rules also change. When you learned to speak and write English, for example, you probably were taught that they is inappropriate as a singular pronoun. But before the 1850s, people commonly used they as the singular pronoun for individuals whose gender was unknown—for example, “the owner went out to the stables, where they fed the horses” (Spender, 1990). In 1850, male grammarians petitioned the British Parliament to pass a law declaring that all gender-indeterminate references be labeled he instead of they (Spender, 1990). Since that time, teachers of English worldwide have taught their students that they used as a singular pronoun is “not proper.”