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Age-Grading and Linguistic Continuity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Charles F. Hockett
Charles F. Hockett*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

The origin and development of speech habits in individuals, through their life cycles from birth to death, can appropriately be termed linguistic ontogeny. In contrast to this, the subject matter of historical linguistics—changes through decades and centuries in the speech patterns of communities—is of course linguistic phylogeny. The present paper deals with certain relations between these two: specifically, with the mechanisms whereby continuity of linguistic tradition is maintained in a community in the face of the constant turnover of population through birth and death, immigration and emigration. Jespersen has discussed this problem, and has connected it with historical linguistics by asking what relation there may be between these mechanisms and the fact that languages change in the course of time. But Jespersen, as is well known, did not accept the assumption that phonetic change is regular.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 26 , Issue 4-Part1: October-December , December 1950 , pp. 449 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © 1950 by the Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 A shorter version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New York, December 30, 1948.

2 Otto Jespersen, Language: Its nature, development and origin, Chapters 9-10 (London and New York, 1922).

3 This and other evidence from dialectology is based on discussions with Raven I. McDavid Jr. and Henry L. Smith Jr., to both of whom thanks are hereby expressed.

4 As reported by Einar Haugen at a Luncheon Conference of the Linguistic Institute, Ann Arbor, in the summer of 1947.

5 Martin Joos, Acoustic phonetics 63-4 (Baltimore, 1948).

5a [At the risk of injecting a merely personal note, the Editor must question the implication that persons raised by English-speaking parents in a foreign country invariably grow up with a peculiar foreign-tinged variety of English. He is himself a person of this kind, having learned his English entirely from his parents and having had practically no contacts with other English-speaking children until his thirteenth year; yet no one appears to have detected any foreign flavor in his adult speech.—BB]

6 Leonard Bloomfield, Language 46-7 (New York, 1933).

7 The term, and knowledge of the situation, are both fairly old. Age-grading is mentioned as a human universal by G. P. Murdock, The common denominator of cultures' The science of man in the world crisis 123-42 (ed. by Ralph Linton; New York, 1945).

8 W. C. Bennett and R. M. Zingg, The Tarahumara (Chicago, 1935).

9 Some observations of this kind have been reported in the literature; references will be found in Werner F. Leopold, The study of child language and infant bilingualism, Word 4.1-17 (1948); note especially H. V. Velten, The growth of phonemic and lexical patterns in infant language, Lg. 19.281-92 (1943). I have made some casual observations of the same sequence in my own children, and have heard of similar experiences from several colleagues.

9a [Cf. especially Peg for Meg ‘Margaret’ and Polly for Molly ‘Mary’.—BB]

10 Namely the various reports of Robert A. Hall Jr.

11 Robert A. Hall Jr., Aspect and tense in Haitian Creole (paper delivered at the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Philadelphia, December 28, 1949).

12 A. Irving Hallowell, The size of Algonkian hunting territories: A function of ecological adjustment, American Anthropologist 51.35-45 (1949). Though the investigation on which Hallowell's figures are based was conducted only recently, he assures me (in a private communication) that in aboriginal times the opportunity for contacts between children could hardly have been greater than it now is.