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Social, Economic, And Political Pressures

Decent Essays

Before today’s modern English, our language has gone through several changes and developments. Language is constantly “evolving”, but it is neither a bad or good thing. Language change is a natural occurrence and cannot be stopped completely. There is many reasons that language may change. Nicole Mahoney writes that reasons for change can be responses to social, economic, and political pressures (Mahoney). Other reasons are invasions of towns and villages, colonization, migration, and interaction with people who speak other languages. An example of one of these is “Adios, amigos!”. This probably seems like a phrase you hear all the time, to you it is just common phrase. A hundred years ago, however, if one was to say this, others would have no idea where it came from or what it means. Through migration and interaction with Spanish speakers we have learned now common words and include them in our casual everyday language. Examples are “Hola!”, “Adios!”, “Te amo”, and etc. Linguists believe a major agent of change is due to children. Children hear the language their parents speak and start to internalize it in a different way. Before today’s “Modern” English, there were major shifts: Old English Shift and Great Vowel Shift. Both of these lead to how we speak today and why we speak the way we do. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson state in “A Guide to Old English”, in the Old English language they used the Germanic language of Great Britain. This can be

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