A study led by McGill University researchers challenges the theory that language change over time requires new generations to replace older generations of speakers. Rather, when words change meaning, speakers of all ages participate; while older speakers might take two or three years longer than their younger colleagues to adopt new word usage, in some cases they lead the way in introducing new word meanings into the common vocabulary, the researchers found.
"This runs counter to general beliefs about how language evolves over time," said Gaurav Kamath, a PhD student in Linguistics at McGill and the lead author on the paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America. The researchers reached their conclusion after using AI models to analyze changes in the use of over 100 words found in 7.9 million U.S. Congressional speeches given between 1873-2010 by several thousand different speakers.
While it was difficult for the researchers to identify a new meaning of a word as it emerged, once a new meaning for a word was well established, they were able to look backward to see when it first appeared and to trace shifts in meanings over time.
For instance, the term "article" to refer to a part of a bill or law was a constant throughout the period 1873 to 2010. However, the use of "article" to refer to objects, while common until the 1940s, was much less so by the 1950s. Since about the 1970s, it has mainly referred to news stories.
While the study offers insight into the social processes of language change in a very particular setting, the next step in the research would be to investigate whether these findings hold true among more diverse linguistic, cultural and social groups.
"We used data from American Congressional speeches because it allowed us to track individuals' speech patterns over several decades; but politicians usually aren't the most socially representative group of language speakers," say the authors of the study, including Morgan Sonderegger, an Associate Professor in McGill's Department of Linguistics, and one of the co-authors of the paper. "Could our methods be used to predict people's uptake of up-and-coming slang used by today's teenagers?" That would require further study, he suggested.
About the study
"Semantic Change in Adults is Not Primarily a Generational Phenomenon" by Gaurav Kamath et al was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America (PNAS).
This work was partly funded by a Doctoral Training Award from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture.
