Language change and Language contact Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Language change and Language contact - Essay Example The linguistic structure of any language is the pillar of dialect differentiation. That is vocabulary and grammar which is composed of the formation of words (morphology) and sentence structure (syntax). For instance, in Australia, Canada and US, the term corn is interpreted as maize. The same word means wheat and oats in England and Scotland respectively. A language code is a letter or a number for identifying different languages. They are useful in the organization of data for a particular language. Schemes use them to classify languages. In ISO 639‑1 for instance, the name of English is en and the name of Spanish language is es. In the 16th to 19th century, Europeans and non-Europeans interacted in other areas other than Europe. There various activities that led to these interactions such as colonization, plantation agriculture, mining and trade. Pidgin as a language, it developed as a means of communication between those groups. There were no native speakers as the users of the language used it only for their activities and they went back to their native languages for intrapersonal communication. When different cultures and languages come together, they combine their gestures, sounds and their words to form pidgin. In communication of people from different language backgrounds, there exist different gestures, different vocal patterns and speeches. For smooth communication, they have to adjust all of them according to their personal usage. Communication accommodation is practiced to reduce social differences. There are two processes that are involved in communication accommodation which are convergence and divergence accommodation (Fromkin & Hyams, 2014). Phonology is a part of language change and deals with how to sequence and structure the speech sounds. Different languages have different phonemes (speech sound). For instance, the sound ng in bang cannot be allowed to come in front of the word. In phonology