How children learning their first language may affect how languages change over time

What is it about?

This paper argues that common patterns in how languages change over time may arise from how children learn properties of their first language. All children need to work out the specific details of the grammars (sound systems, word formation rules, sentence formation rules, meanings) they are exposed to in infancy and childhood. The basic premise of this paper comes from a now old idea: in learning all the details of the language around them, children introduce subtle new properties into the language, and this is why (or one major reason) languages all change all the time (consider English from 50, 100, 200 years ago - the further back the more different from today). This paper draws on child language patterns and experiments to assess whether this idea holds any water from a child language perspective.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This work is important because the idea that child learners introduce changes into languages over time is among the oldest ideas in linguistic science (dating back to the Neogrammarians of the 19th Century, and also alluded to in Charles Darwin's work), but it is an inference from completed changes, and has very rarely been tested for whether it is compatible with child language patterns. Do children learning their first language(s) actually behave in ways that are consistent with children driving the language changes of today (and tomorrow)? This paper revises sociolinguistics approaches to change-in-progress to include consideration of the dynamics of child language development.

Perspectives