Why Innovations Arise
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WHY ACCENTS DIFFER
Why innovations arise
The fundamental reason why accents differ is that languages change. The developments which have arisen and become established in different places and among different social groups have not been identical.
Why do innovations arise?
All change is decay and corruption, and new pronunciation patterns are a result of human laziness and slovenliness principle of least effort
Leads us to tend to pronounce words and sentences in a way which involves the minimum of articulatory effort consistent with the need to maintain intelligibility.
For example: a voiceless [t] between vowels, as in better or atom, involves not only a tongue-tip movement up to the alveolar ridge and away again, but also a switching off and on again of the vibration of the vocal cords. It is easier if the vibration of the vocal cords is continued throughout the alveolar articulation (voiced t).
Another way of simplifying [t] is to abandon the alveolar component, concentrating all the articulatory modifications at the glottis
Or the alveolar articulation may not be abandoned, butmerely carried out in a half-hearted way, so that no complete occlusion is effected: the outcome here is the alveolar slit fricative of Irish English.
The principle of least effort provides a post hoc explanation of each of these rival developments, but offers no guide as to why one rather than another should develop. Nor does it explain why intervocalic /t/ should undergo these developments while intervocalic /p/ or /k/ or /f/ do not.
Some segment types are more natural than others: they are learnt earlier by children, they are found more widely in the languages of the world, and pronunciation changes tend to work towards them. Naturalness is not quite the same thing as articulatory simplicity.
Many of the articulatory movements in speech involve great precision of timing. In a word such as mince [mins] for example three adjustments of the organs of speech are required in order to effect the transition from [n] to [s]: the tongue tip has to come away from the alveolar ridge, converting the complete occlusion into a fricative-type narrowing, the soft palate has to rise, converting the nasal into an oral articulation, and the vocal cords have to stop vibrating. Unless all three changes happen simultaneously, a transitional segment will result [mints]
Not only certain segment types, but also certain sequential possibilities are more natural than others.
Assimilation: the process whereby a sound is made phonetically more similar to the sounds constituting its phonetic environment.
For example: amete amt ant. The change from [m] to [n] before a following [t] is an assimilation which results in an obvious articulatory simplification, namely the elimination of a labial movement.
System preservation
Pressure of the necessity to preserve intelligibility
The obvious usefulness of reserving distinctions reinforces the natural human tendency towards conservatism in social institutions, language among them.
Split and mergers
Some sound changes lead to alterations in the system of oppositions.
In some cases a phoneme undergoes a split single phoneme becomes two
The process of phoneme splitting can be slow. A Positional allophone develops into an independent phoneme because of changes in the environments in which it occurs.
Decay of an allophone-conditioning environment and interrupted or incomplete lexical diffusion are major factors in the causation of phonemic splits.
In other cases phonemes undergo a merger, so that what were previously contrasting phonemes now cease to contrast, becoming merged into a single phoneme
Both splits and mergers inevitably involve an alternation in the phonemic system: splits increase the number of terms in a system, mergers reduce it.
Regularization
Some sound changes can be explained on the grounds that they lead to greater simplicity in the grammar. This involves simplifying not the physical movements of the articulators but the abstract mental plan of the language which underlies our ability to speak it.
There is always a pressure to remove irregularities by bringing irregular forms under the general rule. The less well-known and frequently used a word is, the more it is susceptible to this kind of pressure.
Any phoneme merger reduces the number of contrasting items in the system and therefore constitutes a simplification
Certain phoneme splits may also be seen as leading to greater regularity.
When foreign words are borrowed into English they are usually made to conform to English pattern. Full integration implies a phonological reinterpretation in terms of English phonemes arranged in patterns which follow English phonotactic constraints.
It is not only foreign borrowings that may be regularized in this way. Folk etymology is the reinterpretation of a learned word in terms of familiar morphemic components, as when asphalt takes the popular form ashfelt.
Why innovations spread
Two options: either it will catch on, or it will die stillborn
If it catches on, it may spread to a wider area or it may remain to a small group of speakers, and later in due course die out again.
It will spread only of it is imitated. It will be imitated only if it is felt to be in some sense admirable who use it are perceived as setting the fashion. Fashions are set by various groups at various times more in larger cities than in rural areas. This is why country speech is conservative or old-fashioned, while city speech is innovative and up-to-date.
In respect of social class, it is obvious that many sound changes have spread from higher social strata to lower. The upper or upper middle class on the whole define the standards of speech as of most other matters, and other classes gradually pick up their ways of doings things. This is why working-class speech is often relatively old-fashioned.
RP in England enjoy overt prestige. People agree that speakers with this accent have no accent and that this is the correct way of speaking. Such accent is a de facto standard.
But is has also been shown