Language Change and Language Death - The Mozambican Context

                                                            Contents

Introduction        1

Defining the language        2

Language change        2

Causes of language changes        3

Types of language change        4

Lexical change        4

Phonological change        5

Grammatical Change        6

Semantic Change        6

Language death        8

Causes of language death        8

Sudden language death        9

Radical language death        10

Gradual language death        10

Bottom-to-top language death        10

Possible solutions to prevent the language death        11

Conclusion        12

Bibliography        13

Introduction

It would never make sense for us to speak of humanity without speaking of the language, although the contrary could still be possible because, not only the people can communicate but the animals can do it as well. And when trying to define the concept of the language, we would almost spend our whole life, because of the huge existence of definitions for it, but it’s for certain that we would always end up finding out that “the language isn’t solely words, but the grammar that we use to put them together to produce utterances that reflect our impressions of our lives, experiences, and environment, as well as enable us to affect people and events around us “(McWhorter, 2004:3).

The following work  is not only focused on the language itself but other than that, explore the factors behind the languages which are the changes that make them seem much more improved when compared to the former ones, and on the other hand look on the influences that these changes can provide either in a good or harmful way. On the other hand the work tries to take the general findings and compares with the reality in Mozambique, highlighting the places where these cases pretty much happen. Moreover the work intends to go a bit deeper by trying to understand the impacts of the language changes from the various types of uses mainly by the society and the teenager students at schools, explores the relationship between English, Portuguese and some Vernacular languages such as Cisena and Cindau and also deals with the behaviour of the individuals towards the language death regardless of the existence of the bilingue teaching in the countryside or other relevant factors linked to the language death.

The gathering of information was mainly based on the bibliographic method, which was very important, not only for the findings in them, but also for making this work possible and existent.

Defining the language

Throughout a very long time the term language has been exposed to a variety of meanings, most of the times as one being simpler or more complex than another. On contributing to finding definitions of language some authors state the following:

Wardhaugh (2006:8) states that “a language can be used to refer either to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related norms”. On the other hand, Saussure (1959:16) made also his thought available by stating that “Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc.”

Language change

Hickey (n.d:2) points out that there is no simple explanation for why languages change because this is a very difficult area to find straightforward or convincing ways of answering its specific facts. Most of the times researchers rely on speculations and short amounts of proofs, but nevertheless, historical linguistics is still getting curious in knowing how the language changes rather than in why it does change.

The writer agrees with the author to the extent that “language change is both obvious and rather mysterious” Murray (1996:249) and dealing with it involves not only the sociolinguistics but the historical linguistics and many other disciplines that are determined to understand the changes in the languages especially in very multilingual or multicultural countries like Mozambique where the linguistic situation is complex.

McDULING (1995:60) claims that “language change refers to linguistic changes (e.g. phonetic, semantic) which occur within a specific language over time”. On the other hand, it’s also believed that “Changes in a language are the changes in the grammars and the lexicon of people who speak the language and are perpetuated as new generations of children who acquire the altered language and make further changes “(Fromkin et al., 2010:489). 

On trying to break down the language change Guy (1989:2) and MAHDAD (2011/2012:21) believe that the language change occurs in three situations: spontaneous, borrowing, and imposition.

(Jones and Esch, 2002:123) quoted by MAHDAD (2011/2012:21), defines that spontaneous change is the change over the time, not on purpose but rather through interaction because no two people speak exactly the same and because people tend to adopt new words and utterances. On the term borrowing, MAHDAD (2011/2012:21) and Yule (2010:54) meet the same way of thinking when both say that borrowing is a process whereby users of one language make the use of another’s languages peculiarities. While impositions are viewed “as a phenomenon occurring either through colonization or invasion by forcing the weaker communities to adopt another language, one aim being to eradicate their cultures” MAHDAD (2011/2012:21). Guy (1989:3) summed up all these criteria by saying that the spontaneous changes are internally induced changes or they come from within the community interaction, while the borrowing and imposition result from the external inducement or contact of the community with more than one language.