Language Change: Progress or Decay? (review)

In 1983, as a new assistant professor teaching History of the English Language for the first time, I picked up a copy of Jean Aitchison’s Language change: Progress or decay? (London: Fontana, 1981, reviewed in Language 59.411–14, 1983), attracted in equal parts by its flashy cover and by the title’s promise to answer the question my students were most concerned about. Over the years things have changed: A is now the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford, the book has grown from fourteen to seventeen chapters, the publisher is now Cambridge University Press, and the cover no longer has the cartoon superhero of the original edition. But the relevance of the title question remains. Many undergraduates’ first exposure to linguistics brushes up against their likely preconception that language change is decay. A’s book is a useful text because it takes this issue as its point of departure. A thus engages readers’ attention from the start and sustains it with popular culture references, engaging epigrams, clever chapter titles, and accessible writing.

Chs. 1–3 discuss the inevitability of change (and the inevitability of complaints about change), the methods of historical linguistics, and the study of language variation. Chs. 4–6 describe the spread of change in speech communities, considering social factors of prestige, gender, and race. Here she introduces now-classic studies of New York City, Martha’s Vineyard, Norwich, and Reading, and she adds for this edition discussion of Penelope Eckert’s work on Detroit. Chs. 7–9 deal with syntactic and semantic change. Of particular note are Ch. 8 (on grammaticalization) and Ch. 9 (on semantic change), which are new to the third edition.

Chs. 10 and 11 examine sociolinguistic mechanisms that trigger change and the factors within a language that shape it. A shows how factors of fashion, foreign influence, social need, and naturalness (phonetic and syntactic) prompt change. Chs. 12 and 13 in turn consider the notion of disruptive change, pattern repair, and chain reactions. These chapters provide a good introduction to some ideas that students sometimes find tricky. In Ch. 14, an interlude, A considers the role of language disorders and acquisition as potential causes of change, arguing that these are largely irrelevant.

Chs. 15 and 16 look at the birth and death of language, treating pidginization, creolization, assimilation, and code-switching. Ch. 17, a brief conclusion, returns to the initial theme of progress vs. decay, emphasizing that language change is neither. Pages 261–312 include a brief list of symbols and terms, notes to the text, suggestions for further reading, and references. Language change: Progress or decay? is comprehensive and engaging in a way that perfectly suits an undergraduate text for linguistics or English students, though it would need to be supplemented with additional texts or readings. It is also a good read for interested laypeople. And while this third edition is still quite a fine book, the next edition (in 2011?) will certainly need updated examples from public discussion of language. I have no doubt that they will be readily available.