Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

by John McWhorter

our general sense of how language changes undershoots the reality. What we usually mean by “language changes” is that: 1. slang changes 2. we always need new words for new things 3. when different people come together, they will exchange words. That is, we imagine language change as driven by cultural factors, because this is the kind of language change we can hear happening in our daily lives. Sext, iPad, quinoa—slang, terminology, and foreign words, respectively—this is the language change we know. Less obvious is that besides these things, language also always changes just by itself. In other words, it is “inherently mutational.” Each generation hears sounds a little differently from the previous one and produces them differently.