Do languages change at different rates?

Question

Do some languages change more slowly or quickly than others?

If so, what factors slow or accelerate the rate of change? (For this question, let's forget about the possible effects of modern mass media and concentrate on factors that might have always affected the rate of language change.)

I know that, as long as a language has native speakers, the language will change. But how fast?

(Thanks go to the book, "Language Myths" (Laurie Bauer, ed.), for telling us lay people that Appalachian dialects of English are not the same as Elizabethan English.)

Answer 1

Languages definitely change at different rates. A clear contrast is between Icelandic and some dialects of Norwegian - Icelandic has one of the slowest rates of change observed (Icelandic schoolkids can read the Norse sagas as easily as English-speaking schoolkids can read Shakespeare), but certain Norwegian dialects have some of the highest rates observed. And yet both are North Germanic - clearly speed of change is independent of the actual language that's changing.

It's not clear at all what causes these disparities. To some degree, isolation seems to be a factor, but it's not obvious which direction it pushes (Norwegian dialects were pretty isolated from each other due to mountains, and Icelandic has been pretty isolated from the rest of the world due to location). Other factors may include how many people are learning the language as adults (more learners tends to lead to innovations that simplify things), and the level of visibility of a written prestige/standard variety (since standard/prestige varieties tend to be based on older forms of the language, and speakers may want to emulate prestigious writing styles in speech). There may be additional factors as well, some of which might well be due to the language itself - for example, if a language ends up in some kind of unstable state (say, with a very unbalanced vowel system), it may suddenly right itself, thus triggering a cascade of further changes (say, if rebalancing the vowel system results in ambiguity in person-marking verb suffixes; then the person-marking suffixes will themselves change). Indeed, there's so many potential factors affecting speed-of-change that it's very hard to isolate any one to study it.

While some aspects of the mechanics of linguistic change are fairly well understood (we have a pretty good idea about how things like phonemic imbalances and articulatory difficulty can cause change), other factors (for example, things like sound changes not caused by either of the above) are less well understood. Rate-of-change and change timing are things that we just don't really know that much about yet.

Answer 2

Yes, languages change at different rates. An Italian linguist, Matteo Giulio Bartoli, elaborated 5 norms that can help explain or at least understand how languages can change differently.

Note: I've studied these norms in Italian so the English translation I'll be giving them might not be what you can see in books, researches, etc. Please note that I might not be choosing the best terminology, so feel free to comment for corrections. For example "form" is here intended as "linguistic phase of a language".

The examples are not meant to be fully meaningful sentences but only represent how words (nouns and adjectives) change depending on their geographical location. Also, the words are presumably Latin forms that give origin to the modern words and do not represent the modern language itself.

1. Norma dell'Area Isolata (Isolated Area)

   This one states an isolated area (and so less exposed to commerce and communicaton) usually keeps an early linguistic form. An example of this is Icelandic, very similar to the Old Norse.

   Another example is Sardinian, derived from Latin, that still keeps many features of this language unlike Italian that evolved quite a bit from it. A clear example is the use of the personal pronoun ego to say "I" in some towns¹.

   Sardegna: domus magnus ager
   Iberia: casa grandis campus
   Gallia: casa grandis campus
   Italia: casa grandis campus
   Dacia: casa mare campus

2. Norma dell'Area Centrale (Central Area)

   The lateral areas will usually keep a later form than the central area, with the condition that the central area is not an isolated area. An example

   Iberia: equa mūtāre formōsus
   Gallia: caballa cambiare bellus
   Italia: caballa cambiare bellus
   Dacia: equa mūtāre formōsus

   The central one will present an innovation.

3. Norma dell'Area Maggiore (Bigger Area)

   The bigger, wider area will usually keep the early form. The condition is that the smaller area is also not the isolated area or the sum of the lateral areas.

   Iberia: cor deus furnus
   Gallia: cor deus furnus
   Italia: cor deus furnus
   Dacia: anima dominus deus coctōrium

4. Norma dell'Area Seriore (Older Area, seriore means "chronologically later")

   The zones where the language has arrived later will keep an early form.

   Latin: edĕre > Spanish: (comedere) > comer
   Latin: manducāre > Italian: mangiare

   Latin reached Spain after Italy for obvious reasons.

5. Norma della Fase Sparita (Disappeared form)

   This is not a geographical norm, rather it states that if we have two phases/forms and one of them died or is about to, and the other one survives, the first one is usually the early form.

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^{1: Sardinian is not a "single" language but has countless varieties, usually changing from town to town. Being the more different the farther you go from a certain location.}

Answer 3

I agree with all the answers here. I would recommend Dixon's 'Rise and Fall of Languages' http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Fall-Languages-R-Dixon/dp/0521626544/ where he explores some of these issues in depth. I particularly found his analogy with 'punctuated equilibria' very useful. But he also addresses questions of language boundaries and relatedness. Well worth a read, even if a bit controversial in places.

Answer 4

Yes. I quote pp. 122-124 of McWhorter, J. PhD Linguistics (Stanford). Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (2009). He bruits that Icelandic changed less than other Germanic languages.

p. 122

  Comparison reveals what was going on even if no one at the time bothered to describe it. Among Germanic languages, Icelandic, spoken on a remote island, has (1) rarely been learned by foreigners and (2) is also the least simplified member of the family. Even today, its grammar is so little changed from Old Norse that Icelanders can read the epic eddas in Old Norse written almost a thousand

p. 123

years ago. Icelandic has three genders; most of those case endings and conjugations we saw in Old Norse are still used in everyday language in Reykjavík; and it’s got the “you mistake you” quirk, hithering and thithering, V2, a be-perfect, and most everything else the well-dressed Proto-Germanic descendant wears.
  Icelandic shows that there is nothing inevitable about a language tossing off its suffixes and what linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir called “nuance” over time. Linguists call a language that has a way of holding on to what is passed down to it “conservative.” Ordinarily, languages’ grammars are rather conservative—like Latin, Greek, and Russian.
  In comparison, even the other Germanic languages besides Icelandic are less conservative. It surely isn’t an accident that they also, roiling around on the Continent, where populations have been mixing and conquering one another forever, have been learned by foreigners much more than Icelandic. This is why German, Dutch, and Swedish have shed a lot more of Proto-Germanic’s suffixes than Icelandic. However, that’s pretty much all. Suffixes—small and usually pronounced without stress (or, in the term more common among laymen, accent)—are uniquely fragile. But otherwise, these languages retain the other complexities of Proto-Germanic. Largely, their coexistence with other languages (including one another) has been a matter of linguistic equilibrium—stewing, but not boiling down.