Driving linguistic factors and language "loss"(?)

Factual Questions
1

A lot of things affect our speech, and obviously we can all say “the internet” right, but I think there has to be something else right?

Think about this: plurals.
These days “women” has become both a plural and a singular among a large group of netizens, and i’ve even noticed that the change from singular to plural now sits on the O sound. (wuh-men vs. weh-men) but even that is inconsistent on which is the plural and which is the singular.

Think about this: personal voice and (what Google tells me) “idiolect.”
Personal “accents” essentially, ways of speech that are particular to an individual, or just a small in group maybe. Like how in the states some people can tell “oh you’re from the northern part of the state aren’t you?” or “oh you must be from this area of the state” even though most people would consider their accents the same. There’s also personal voice, not just in how distinctly individual a described experience is but also in how intimately you come to know that feeling/experience through said description.

  • An example of the loss of personal voice is easily attributed in part to the internet’s love of irony, which seems to depersonalize a lot. The statement “I’m concerned about this health issue” or “I’m worried I can’t get my homework done” became a meme of “The lion does not concern himself with [health issues and homework]” which just completely took the self out of the equation.
  • An example of loss in idiolect I think comes directly from the plural confusion, which I think must be connected because it seems to be about a change in pronunciation of the word and dialects definitely change where emphasis is placed and how. People are no longer sticking to their pronunciation of words, but WHY?

Again, we could of course cite the internet as a driving factor to this, but I want to know a step further than that. What’s causing that, what’s causing the loss in words and localized or personalized dialects? Why are we all heading to this homogeneous place with fewer words and less verbal/vocal differentiation?

Edit to overall simplify:

  • What other than the internet is a driving factor to changing speech in the modern day? What leads to the dropping of certain words among groups that could use them just fine (like no longer using the singular version of a word, when the singular version is still linguistically useful?)
2

Cites for these claims?

3

This is mostly based on things i’ve noticed just while doomscrolling but thing’s I’ve searched up since posting include:

  • this covers idiolects in a lot more depth, and has also allowed me a bit more insight into the fact that I was using the term a little incorrectly in my original post. Idiolect seems to be a lot more internally defined than much else, I still don’t fully grasp the concept but it seems I didn’t completely misuse it either.
  • this article covers vocab decline and has found that there are some arguments towards vocabulary increases at the time of study[edit: time of study is 2016] (the “Flynn effect” and generally more people completing high school or higher education being cited as reasons vocabulary might be on an increase) and also points out some arguments towards decrease such as changes in populations (with an influx of non-English speaking populations there would be a decrease in English vocabulary, with an influx of students involved in testing outcomes of general population testing such as the SAT will change,) and changes in reading throughout the general population (fewer people of the time were reading)
  • this particular study finds a decrease in vocabulary

  • these two go over “Dialect leveling” (the second is a blog post I discovered, not an academic sources, though it’s a relevant personal account on the experience being discussed)

  • it seems this is the term i’m trying to discuss, and the Cambridge link attributes the levelling to multiple causes including “access to social mobility” alongside a lot of other factors surrounding (to boil down something complex for ease) community.

there’s also a study titled “Dialect leveling and Language attitudes In a Basque town” by Azler Garcia-Palomino (titled here, should be downloadable below, but I am tech illiterate so don’t rely on it sorry)
The paper mentioned above cites a few causes, again mentioning physical mobility and location changes, but also increased communication, education, and influence of media. I found it mentions “rapid convergence with the standard across several varieties since [the language’s] recent standardization in the 80s” pretty early on, which shows that this process isn’t as hyper-modern as I may have thought, and seems to be something that is pretty normalized when groups gain more contact, mobility, interaction, and other rapid social changes.

Garcia_2021_SOSY2021proceedings.pdf (930.5 KB) i’ve linked it like this in case you want to read, honestly this was the best find I feel like this is the most related to my overall question even though it’s looking at one particular group, it’s given me some insight into why the changes in language might be happening the way they are now.

4

Thank you for responding with your sources.

5

A strong factor is the deliberate desire to not sound like your parents’ generation. It may not be a loss, but rather a deliberate desire to bury and avoid use of particular oldster words. Usually accompanied by rolling eyes, air quotes or general snark.

6

Code-switching, I’m guessing.

People do it naturally. It’s the reason I can swear like a sailor in my personal life, but never in front of a preschooler; the reason, when I was a car hobbyist, and hung around with lots of native Hoosiers, I once picked up a spark plug that had come out of an engine with a miss, and said “It ain’t gapped, Dude”; the reason that someone at synagogue tells a group that her boss asked to meet with her before she left the day of erev Pesach, and was surprised she was leaving early, since her (the boss’s) calendar said that Passover didn’t start until sundown, then someone in the group says “Goyisher kop!” and gets a big laugh.

People are probably code-switching so rapid-fire on the internet, that it is happening incompletely, and sometimes in sort of in mixed measures when dialects are similar.

Also, there are studies of why which dialect or language is switched to, and which party to a conversation switches: visual and sound cues mainly are used-- not so much cues within the language itself. There are cues of environment, and sometimes those exist on the internet, but sometimes not. One person joining a group will usually switch to the group, and that could happen online, albeit, more conversations are sequential, and not simultaneous, so even in a group, you are often responding to just one person at a time, and my picture just one person as your audience.

But I’m suspecting that a lot of times code-switching just goes haywire when there are no cues, and no one knows what to do, since it is an involuntary and thoughtless process. (By “thoughtless” I don’t mean “rude,” I mean literally something you do without thinking.)

I’m not sure when the human brain becomes capable of code-switching, but until age 4, complex grammar processing is not happening, which is why preschoolers begin every single clause with “and,” and why even the brightest ones don’t follow adult conversation. Neural pathway growth and pruning in Broca’s are continues through adolescence (I do not know whether growth rate & stoppage is affected by pubescence in an individual), so code-switching may happen in there somewhere, albeit, from personal experience, I’d guess it has developed to the point of being useful by age 10, since I was capable of automatically responding in whatever language in which I was spoken to by that age.

My mother wrote her dissertation on code-switching in 1982, when interest in it was growing, so there is probably a lot on it out there now.

7

Technology overall - TV, movies, text-speak.
Increasing globalization and global travel, too.
Some flattening of class, which was a big contributor to a proliferation of dialects but not so much anymore.

8

As John Steinbeck observed in Travels with Charley, this was already well underway by the early 60s:

…regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man’s place of origin by his speech. That is growing more difficult now and will in some foreseeable future become impossible. It is a rare house or building that is not rigged with spiky combers of the air. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless.

9

Great cite there @Q.Q.Switcheroo.

This has been going on since forever. 150 years ago the island of Great Britain had dozens of local languages. Not just accents; languages. Now they all speak English. Differently accented English to be sure, but those too are receding. With regional markers receding faster than class markers.

As to the idea language is being lost or simplified, part of it is the democratizing effect of the internet. None of the people here on this messageboard would ever have read the writings or heard the speaking of any others of us in a WWW-less world. We’d only be reading or hearing the words of professional authors and professional actors & newsreaders. All filtered through professional editors.

Language itself isn’t so different. What’s different is what cross-section of it is available to amateur observers such as ourselves.

10

Can you explain what you mean by this being a singular? Are you saying people will write “a women walked by”?

11

Yeah, I’d be very surprised by this. If I heard someone say, “Men and woman are equal,” I’d be baffled: this is so far from the sort of thing a native speaker would say that I’d wonder if they natively spoke a different language, or if they were poorly making some obscure point through the strange phrasing, or if they’d just inadvertantly said the wrong syllable. Similarly, if someone said, “One women is my class said….” I wouldn’t hear anything that followed, because I’d be so tripped up by the strange phrasing.

Pronouncing the second syllable identically? Sure. That’s how it’s almost always pronounced. But the first syllable is different every single time, in my experience.

12

Steinbeck was writing platitudes even for the time. Pedants had been screaming about the standardization of regional English, in spoken and written English, since the heyday of radio. Ironic since before then they had been screaming about the ways that immigrants had been “degrading” the language by introducing new words and dialects. And then after 1960 it was youth who were the criminals.

And it’s been youth who prevented Steinbeck’s nonsensical closing. “And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless.” National discourse is changing faster than ever before - and it always changed quickly - because of young posters on social media influencing the language. Some words may have been “lost” but for each dozens of new words emerged.

Standard and tasteless language is the exact opposite of what followed. In exactly the same way, a million food choices have emerged from the standard and tasteless 1950s food. Similar broadening can be found in every aspect of the country. We’re a far more diverse culture nationally than combined in the idiosyncratic local cultures before national instant communication.

13

We talked about it in my broadcasting classes in the early 70s. Someone would blame television, then someone else would point out that it started with radio, then someone would comment that the rise of press associations in the late 1800s had standardized vocabulary and sentence structure, etc.

It probably goes back at least to the development of dictionaries with pronunciation guides. The oldest example I could find was the The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language in 1849.

14

Yes that is what I mean, I see people often using the plural “women” when speaking about a singular woman such as “That women seriously needs help.” or “so the women put herself out there and..” when telling a story involving a singular woman. It’s not 100% consistent either, it’s not as if the singular “woman” is lost, it just seems more and more to be appearing as “women” both plural and singular in online spaces.

15

I wonder too what extent that mass media shares the blame for this. In the 1800’s, authorship of published literature was generally the province of the better educated, so what we see from that era is a complex language with a wide vocabulary. Since the advent of movies and radio, and then TV, we can see a variety of accents and a wide amount of terminology from the mouths of less educated, but average vocabulary for the masses is IMHO more limited because they don’t get to see that high–falutin’ fancy talk.

A good point, the use of terms like neither-nor and former-latter is far less common in everyday speech. Classic quotes are replaced by great movie lines.

16

I haven’t heard of this woman/women thing the OP mentions either; but a closely analogous situation where this change did occur is “criteria”. Originally, that word is the plural of “criterion”, but it developed to be used as the singular. Initially this would have been considered wrong, but by now it’s become acceptable.

17

Any time a loanword comes from a language with unfamiliar pluralization, it may do that. For example: “zucchini” used as singular or “lasagna” used as plural. In Italian, a lasagna is just one noodle; you need 12 lasagne to make a dish of lasagne. Using just one lasagna at a time would sound hilarious to Italians because nobody does that. Arabic broken plurals (made with vowel changes, like foot/feet) are a mystery to the non-Arabic-speaking world, so in Persian and Urdu they borrow plural words from Arabic and treat them as singular, like English speakers do with zucchini.

18

Can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone say anything like that.

Could it be a case of someone whose dialect tends to rather neutral vowels and you just mis-heard it?

19

I sometimes wonder if the word “worst” will disappear some day, based on the number of times I see “worse case scenario” or “this is the worse day of my life” (e.g.).

20

i’ve seen it typed, but also with when I have heard it spoken this is definitely an option, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was just struggling to hear certain people.