Social Mechanisms of Language Change

Sociolinguistics treats language change as a social process, asking how an innovation arises, spreads through a community, and is embedded in linguistic and social structure before it is completed.

Definition

Social mechanisms of language change are the social and structural processes by which a linguistic innovation originates in a community, is transmitted and diffused across speakers, and becomes a completed change in the language system.

Scope

This topic covers the constraints, transition, embedding, evaluation, and actuation problems that frame any theory of change, the distinction between change from above and change from below the level of conscious awareness, and the social profiles of leaders of change. It addresses transmission across generations versus diffusion across communities, and the role of social class, gender, and networks in propagating innovations. Strictly internal, structural triggers of change are shared with historical linguistics.

Core questions

• How does an individual innovation become a community-wide change?
• What distinguishes change from above from change from below?
• Why does a change actuate in one community at one time but not another (the actuation problem)?
• Who are the leaders of linguistic change, and what social position do they occupy?

Key concepts

• The actuation problem
• Change from above vs. change from below
• Transmission vs. diffusion
• Leaders of linguistic change
• Embedding and evaluation problems

Key theories

The five problems of language change

Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog framed any adequate theory of change around the constraints, transition, embedding, evaluation, and actuation problems, shifting the question from how languages change in the abstract to how change unfolds in speech communities.

Change from above and below

Changes may be introduced consciously from the prestige end of society (from above) or arise below the level of awareness in the vernacular (from below), with the two showing different patterns of social and stylistic stratification.

History

The modern program grew from the 1968 Weinreich-Labov-Herzog paper, which reframed change as orderly heterogeneity in the speech community, and was elaborated in Labov's two volumes of Principles of Linguistic Change distinguishing internal and social factors.

Debates

The actuation problem

Why a given change begins in a particular community at a particular moment, when the same structural conditions exist elsewhere without change, remains the central unsolved question of the field.

Key figures

• William Labov
• Uriel Weinreich
• Marvin Herzog

Seminal works

• weinreich1968
• labov1994
• labov2001

Frequently asked questions

What is the actuation problem?

It is the puzzle of why a particular linguistic change starts in a specific community at a specific time, even though the structural conditions for it may exist in many languages and places without triggering change.