ATTITUDES TOWARDS LANGUAGE

CHANGE
IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE CHANGE

NUR NABILAH HUDA BINTI HAMDAN

BT12110139

INTRODUCTION

Time changes all things: there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.

Ferdinand de Saussure
The study of language change started since the 19th century. (Hickey, 2010)

Continual process that is merely imperceptible yet apparent enough when being compared.
Hudson (2000) pointed out, whenever a language at some point of time is compared with its

descendant language a few hundred years later, the change is obvious.

Changes occur in morphology, syntax, semantic, and phonology.

ATTITUDES TOWARD LANGUAGE CHANGE

Draws many perceptions from historical linguists and sociolinguists.
Receives condemn, critiques and resentment, in spite of the advocates and supports toward the

change.
Two main attitudes: prescription and description

Prescription argues on the standard of correct grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax are the

important aspects of language, concerns on the proper and correct usages of language. Often seen to
be resistant to language change.
Descriptivist tend to accept language change as they believe it is a good thing, necessary and perhaps

even useful system and that it is always going to happen.

THIS PAPER
To observe public attitude towards language

change
Mini survey consisted of 5 succinct questions.
2 Sections: Section A and Section B, respectively.

Section A seeks to see the public awareness

towards language change.

Section B aims to identify common public attitude

towards the issue.

Respondents: 20 random local university

students

RESULTS

CONCLUSION

Public is more inclined into having descriptive attitude instead of prescriptive towards language change.
Living in a multilingual speech communities let them to come up with that attitude as they code-switch

and lexical borrowing at most of the time.

They feel sophisticated when using new words or terms among their friends and colleagues.
The rest says that LB limiting the development of the vocabulary of the language and the speakers of

the language are considered indolent in developing their own lexical items.