Impacts of language change

Language has been the most important way of communication for humans. Since
we have developed such languages that help us communicate and our practiced our
vocal chords in such way that that we can recite different sounds, language has
become the backbone of our society which keeps us informed and help us convey
our message. But languages have not been spoken or wrote in the same way that
they were created in. Languages slowly evolve and takes shaped according to the
society and to some extent, the will of the powerful people. Hence language change
is defined as Language change is variation over time in
a language's phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features.
These language changes occur due to many reasons. Among them some are
1.
2.
3.
4.

Language contact
Geographical Separation
Cultural environment
Migration Etc.

A language change does not happen suddenly as the society slowly evolves and takes a new shape.
But it is very important to follow the changes or else it would get even harder for your generations to
come to communicate with outer world as their language would have already changed compared to
yours. This shows us a glimpse of what impact does language change have on us.
Now we will see how some factors have impact on the process of language change. These factors
would be technology and government. Both of them play a major role in constructing language and
changing it. Technology to an extent applies only to current generation or one before them, but
government has been an important factor because language has always been modified and
changed by those in power such as the governments.
Lets take a look at the technological factor affecting the language change. Information Technology is
one the biggest industry in the world and is growing at a very high rate. The most basic purpose of
technology is to connect people and make day-to-day life easy. As mentioned above, interactions of
people with others, speaking the different language, will eventually lead to some sort of blends in
their language as they will use other persons accent, vocabulary etc. An industry which is dedicated
to this will have huge effects on the language change and will speed up this process. Its effects are
very clear today. New languages have erupted and English is not spoken as it was a few decades
ago before the advancements of technology. In this new form of English, Cyber-English, some of the
most used word are not the, a, an or on, they are abbreviations such as LOL which stands for
Laugh out Loud, ROFL which stands for Rolling on the floor laughing and so on. These words
make absolutely no sense if you would use them 20 years ago, but now everyone knows what these
abbreviations stand for. This is an example of language change because these words are slowly
being accepted and used by the community hence accepting such words, using them often,
completely understanding their meaning has allowed them to change we speak/write English. Hence
this proves 2 theories, first that technology and the social media has a very powerful effect on
language change and second that it is also speeding up the process of language change.
Now lets understand how governments affect the language change. Government, just like
technology, plays a big role in the language change. But this impact and initiation of language
through government is much slower and takes generations too occur. Language changes via the

government occur through the medium of government policies towards the use language which is
also known as Language Policy. Many governments around the world favor or discourage the use of
a particular language or set of words. Many governments use this to promote use of words or
language hence blocking people to use the words that they have blacklisted. Some examples of this
can are
1. The Toubon Law of France states that French should be the only language used in all the
publications, in all workplaces, in all advertisements, in all government documents and etc..
This has led to all the people speak French hence resulting in people to change their
language to French or modify their French to the government standards.
2. The usage of words such as Climate Change or Global Warming is not allowed in the state
of California, USA. Words such as Torture and Jihadist cannot be used in USA and have
been replaced with other less emotional words. This the governments policy to prevent the
usage of such word.
These types too have 2 effects on the spoken languages, just like the technology. First this changes
the way people use the words. They either not use them at all or would decrease their usage and
replace their vocabulary with the new governments policy words. The second effect is that these
word would eventually disappear and become extinct. This has been happening for a long time and
always the governments or the one in power are responsible for it.
We saw how these 2 factors impact the language change process and how their impact on this affect
the society and the community that speaks these languages. Both of these factors do not work
together in changing the use language but have equal and deep effect on our currently spoken
languages. We can conclude that whether its the people in power or the society, language changes
are almost inevitable and will eventually happen, meaning that the Modern English will not remain
modern as some other form will replace it, LOL wouldnt be used anymore in the future and this too
will get replaced. This will then further effect the society and the way they communicate. So we might
not even speak to the coming generations, but who knows.