International Journal of English Studies (IJES) (Jun 2005)
VARIABILITY, LANGUAGE CHANGE, AND THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
Abstract
In historical language scholarship, it has been usual to assume that The transmission of language from generation to generation is itself a linguistic, rather than a social, process, and that the focus should be on uniform language states. Here it is argued that transmission is necessarily social and that the history of a language is necessarily a history of variation. Firts, it is shown that the history of British Received Pronunciation is not one of direct descent from a single uniform ancestral variety. It is then demonstrated that pre-vocalic [h] and [hw] in English have a long history as variables and that loss of [h] in these combinations is not a recent event. Finally, it is suggested that closely similar variants of certain variables, such as [w] for (wh), have most probably recurred independently at various points in history and that we therefore need to review the methods used for dating sound changes.
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