Essay On Changes In English Language

There are many factors that produce language’s change. One of them is ‘’the presence or absence of imperfect learning by a group of people’’ (Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Thomason 2001: 66-76). The second social factor may be the intensity of contact between these two languages. If both languages are in contact for a long time and they have a greater level of bilingualism, it is likely that structural features will be transferred along with lexical items. The third factor is the speaker’s attitudes. It is relevant to the contact change.

The Indo-European languages are a family of languages spoken in most of Europe. They are divided in nine branches: Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavonic, and there are three minor branches: Albanian, Armenian and Tocharian. The Celtic branch can be divided into three groups as well: Gaulish, Britannic and Gaelic. The first one was spoken in France and northern Italy. Britannic was the branch of Celtic spoken in most of Britain before the Anglo-Saxons invasions. It remained into modern times in three languages: Cornish, Welsh and Breton. The

As we can see before, there was three branches of Gaelic. One of them is the Irish Gaelic. It is a Celtic language spoken by 138,000 people as a first language. As a second language, there are 1,000,000 speakers in Ireland and 276,000 first-language speakers worldwide. There are evidences that the first inscriptions dated from the 3rd or 4th century in Ogham, the alphabet of twenty letters. In the 5th century, the conversion to Christianity of the Irish people happened and Old Irish began to appear as glosses in Latin manuscripts. Lebor na hUidre and the Book of Leinster are examples of Old Irish language. In the 10th century, this language evolved to Middle Irish and the Early Modern Irish was the period known as the transition between the Middle and Modern