Attitudes to Language Change

How people respond to language change is itself a subject of linguistic study. Reactions to new words, changing grammar, and shifting pronunciation reveal deep assumptions about language, society, and identity. For AQA A-Level English Language, understanding attitudes to language change is essential because the specification requires you to evaluate competing perspectives and demonstrate critical awareness of the prescriptivism vs. descriptivism debate.

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Aitchison's Three Metaphors

Jean Aitchison (b. 1938), in her influential book Language Change: Progress or Decay? (1981, 4th edition 2013), identified three metaphors that people commonly use when reacting negatively to language change. These metaphors are a central part of the AQA specification and must be thoroughly understood.

1. The Damp Spoon Metaphor

The damp spoon metaphor describes the view that language change is caused by laziness — speakers cannot be bothered to speak "properly" and take linguistic short-cuts, like someone who puts a damp spoon back in the sugar bowl rather than drying it.

Examples of this attitude:

• "Young people are too lazy to pronounce their t's properly" (about glottalisation)
• "Saying gonna instead of going to is just sloppy"
• "Text-speak is the result of laziness"

Aitchison's response: Language change is not caused by laziness. Sound changes such as assimilation and elision are natural phonological processes that occur in all languages. If "laziness" caused language change, we would expect change to be random and unsystematic — but in fact, sound change follows highly regular patterns. Furthermore, so-called "lazy" pronunciations often require just as much articulatory effort as the "correct" ones — they simply use the effort differently.

2. The Crumbling Castle Metaphor

The crumbling castle metaphor describes the view that language was once a perfect or near-perfect structure that is now falling into disrepair through misuse and neglect.

Examples of this attitude:

• "English used to be spoken properly; standards are declining"
• "Shakespeare's English was the pinnacle of the language"
• "Nobody knows how to use an apostrophe anymore"
• "Grammar is being destroyed by social media"

Aitchison's response: There never was a "golden age" of perfect English. Every generation has complained about the language of the next. Jonathan Swift complained in 1712 about the "corruption" of English; Samuel Johnson worried about decline in 1755. If all these complaints were accurate, English would have collapsed centuries ago. Moreover, the metaphor assumes that language was deliberately "built" — in fact, language evolved naturally and has always been in a state of change.

3. The Infectious Disease Metaphor

The infectious disease metaphor describes the view that language change spreads like a disease, with "bad" usage infecting otherwise healthy speakers who "catch" errors from others.

Examples of this attitude:

• "My children picked up terrible grammar from their friends"
• "American English is contaminating British English"
• "Slang is spreading like a virus"
• "Social media is infecting young people's language"

Aitchison's response: Language change does spread through social contact — but this is a normal feature of all human communication, not a pathology. Languages have always influenced each other; English itself is the product of massive borrowing from Latin, French, Old Norse, and many other languages. Describing this process as "infection" reveals a negative attitude to change, not an accurate description of how language works.

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Prescriptivist Commentators

Several prominent public figures have argued that English is in decline and that standards must be maintained:

John Humphrys (b. 1943)

The BBC journalist and broadcaster, in Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language (2004), argued that English is being "mangled" by politicians, advertisers, and technology. Key claims include:

Claim	Example Given
Political language obscures truth	Euphemisms like collateral damage, friendly fire, enhanced interrogation
Texting damages literacy	Abbreviations like c u l8r replace standard spelling
Jargon is exclusionary	Management-speak: going forward, blue-sky thinking, thinking outside the box
Grammar is declining	"Less" instead of "fewer"; split infinitives; dangling modifiers

Evaluation: Humphrys' concerns about political euphemism are shared by many linguists — George Orwell made similar arguments in "Politics and the English Language" (1946). However, his claims about texting and grammar decline are not supported by linguistic evidence. Crystal (2008) has demonstrated that text abbreviations constitute only a small proportion of text messages and that texting ability correlates positively with literacy, not negatively.

N.M. Gwynne (b. 1941)

In Gwynne's Grammar (2013), Gwynne argues that grammar is "the science of using words rightly" and that correct grammar is essential for clear thinking. He presents traditional prescriptive rules (no split infinitives, no sentence-final prepositions) as absolute standards.

Evaluation: Gwynne's approach reflects traditional prescriptivism. Linguists such as Crystal and Pinker point out that many of Gwynne's "rules" have no basis in the history of English and are based on Latin models imposed on a Germanic language.

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Descriptivist Scholars

David Crystal (b. 1941)

Crystal, one of the most prolific and accessible linguists writing today, has consistently argued for a descriptive approach to language. Key works include: