Languages don’t change due to laziness (except when they do)

People love to read myth-busting articles. I like writing them too.

These articles exploit a fear that you’ve been living your life under a misconception about how the world works, one which the author is about to relieve you of.

There’s also a bit of a bribe inherent to the format: once you’ve read the article, you become one of those “in the know”, able to correct others with the tasteful and judicious use of the phrase “um, actually…”

It’s hard to resist clicking on these myth-busting articles because you want to make sure you’re the one “um, actually”-ing others rather than the one getting “um, actually”-ed.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. I too want to share what I know about language, and if that corrects a misconception, so much the better.

A lot of public linguistics writing is this type of myth-busting, simply because there’s often a big gap between the general public’s ideas about language and how linguists see their object of study.

Nowhere is this gap more apparent than when talking about language change, where, according to a common folk belief, languages change mainly because people are too lazy, sloppy, or disrespectful to speak the correct way.

Linguists myth-bust this “decay” theory of language change by showing that language change is constant throughout history. The words the conservative speaker considers the height of correctness today were condemned by earlier generations as barbarous deviations! Checkmate, prescriptivists.

You may be surprised to hear, then, that, for all our myth-busting, many linguists do actually believe a version of the decay theory of language change — in particular, the idea that laziness plays a large role in language change.

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The linguists’ version is morally neutral, of course: it’s not laziness, the moral failing, that changes language. Instead, it’s laziness as the unconscious tendency to make things as easy for the speaker as possible.

The tendency towards least effort explains why, in North American English, the t-sounds in better, data, and motor are pronounced with a quick tap of the tongue that sounds like a d, rather than a proper t-sound. The result is that these words can sound, to the uninitiated, like bedder, dada, and modor.

Or, perhaps closer to home for some of you, it’s why the t + y sequence in don’t you is worn down to a ch: donchu.

In both cases, the sound that takes more effort — the full t in better, the t + y sequence in don’t you — is replaced by one that’s easier, in some sense, to pronounce.

Of course, you wouldn’t call someone whose speech exhibited any of these sound changes lazy. First, that’s rude; second, this is all meant to be a metaphor.

Versions of this laziness explanation for sound change are common in popular books on linguistics and technical articles alike. Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language — one of my pop linguistics recommendations — uses it:

There are many other types of linguistic labour-saving devices, but ultimately they are all variations on the same theme, and follow the principle of least effort: ‘pronounce as little as you can get away with’. When it comes to language, we are all bone-idle.

So too does the legendary linguist Charles Hockett:

despite the large number of factors which play an indirect contributing role in sound change, there is a single factor of greatest importance: the tendency to speak sloppily, doing no more work than is necessary to make oneself understood.

These explanations cast the human mouth as a ruthless optimizer, either Scrooge-like in its stinginess, or, with a better spin on it, zen-like in its commitment to paring back to the essential.

Either way, the main reason sounds change is so they become easier to say. Right?

Um, actually…