| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000. |
| |
| Variation and Change in Our Living Language |
| |
| John R. Rickford |
| |
| New to this edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is a series of 50 Notes, titled Our Living Language, at entries like as far as, be, geek, and za. These Notes were written to help demonstrate that American English, like all living languages, is not uniform and static but diverse and dynamic. Geography, social class, ethnicity, gender, and age, as well as factors internal to the language, influence the way particular speakers use and shape American English. The Our Living Language Notes discuss exemplary linguistic variations resulting from these factors and provide a broader “snapshot” of our language than is allowed by traditional dictionary practice. | 1 |
The dynamism of language is easy to see if we take a historical, or diachronic, view. Latin, for instance, is now a dead language because people no longer learn and use it as a native tongue. But in the prime of its life (between the third century B.C. and the second century A.D.) it varied geographically (Romans said coqu na, “kitchen,” while speakers of Latin in Britain said cogna), socially (between popular and educated speech), and stylistically (between educated speech and writing). Through relentless processes of change, Vulgar Latin evolved into modern varieties of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and French, each dynamically varying and changing in turn. | 2 |
| Despite the ubiquity of variation and change, we are often led to believe that a particular language comes in only one standard, invariant mold, and that deviation or change from that standard spells the impending doom of civilization. But experience repeatedly belies such beliefs. We master textbook Spanish and land in Mexico to encounter a welter of words, pronunciations, and grammatical twists we never even dreamed existed. Or, reading Chaucer, we are struck by the metamorphosis that English has undergone since the 14th century. | 3 |
| |
| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
|
|
