LING316 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Isogloss, Indonesian Rupiah, Upper Class
Document Summary
If we look at figure 6. 2 on page 181, what we see id that the change is indeed spreading slowly as per the neighbourhood effect , but that there is also an urban jump. This shows that the further one moves from the urban centers, the less of the enw variant one finds. As such, the notion of lines (or density) of communication is relevant; communication is greater between urban centers than between urban and rural ones. Now any study of linguistic change must also include a time dimension, which is usually reflected in variation according to speaker"s age. If lowering of the front vowel is in fact a change in progress, i. e a new feature entering the language we should expect to find that the younger a speaker is, the more abundant a form will be. This is in fact the case as can be seen by comparing the charts in figure 6. 3 pn page 182.