Selected Elements of Language Change1 Aleksandra Knapik General Tadeusz Kościuszko Military University of Land Forces, Wrocław, Poland Committee for Philology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Wrocław Branch ABSTRACT: The aim of this article is to present an outline of elements involved in linguistic changes in a language which arise out of contact with other linguistic varieties. One of the crucial research objectives presented here was my belief that the extralinguistic reality (culture included) is to a great extent a product of human verbal (and non- -verbal) interactions. It is due to these interactions that both language and culture can simultaneously be regarded as both a structure and a process. In theory, only prime ethnic groups that do not interact with other groups because of the natural conditions that isolate them from others are fully uniform and culturally separate (cf. Kłoskowska 1996: 40). When two or more cultures interact, we can be faced not only with reciprocal linguistic and cultural borrowings but also, under certain circumstances, we can witness the birth and development of a completely new language and culture. Many languages (and cultures) can give rise to a new speech community which nevertheless does indeed retain many cultural elements and linguistic patterns of the cultures in contact. KEYWORDS: contact linguistics, endangered languages, pidgin, creole, lingua franca, linguistic anthropology 1. Introduction Language change takes place due to contact. For a change to be fixed and lasting, a speaker’s individual innovation must be accepted and adopted by other speakers of the speech community. Sarah G. Thomason makes a division between changes that spread throughout a speech community and the process of spread, which is “a function of contact between speakers” (2003: 687). Any change in language requires an impulse from a group of people in a given area which gradually evolves and becomes an inherent part of that speech community’s language. Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes see language change initiated by the speakers as follows: “[l]anguage change is typically initiated by a group of speakers in a particular locale at a given point in time, spreading from that locus outward in successive stages that reflect an apparent time depth in the spatial dispersion of forms” (2003: 713). 1 The work is based on previously published materials in Knapik (2019: 12, 15–20, 26–34).
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