Language change: tanks, socials, adopters and resisters

As a lexicographer and corpus linguist, I'm firmly a descriptivist. That is, I describe language as it's used (based largely on corpus data). I'm not a prescriptivist who pronounces on how language should or shouldn't be used. When somebody comes to me with a language query, I respond with information about what's typical or most frequent, maybe in a particular context or variety of English, or what's less typical or unusual. I try not to make judgments about what's right or wrong, correct or incorrect.

The same principles apply to new language and language change. If anything, I‘d describe myself as pro-change in that I find the creative flexibility and adaptability of language fascinating and something to be celebrated rather than resisted. Of course, there are words (new and old) and language trends that I personally like less than others. There's language that appears on my radar that, for one reason or another, niggles or makes me roll my eyes and that I wouldn't use myself. However, I try hard not to judge people for their language choices (unless of course they’re obviously offensive).

I've always been fascinated by variation in language and how different individuals use language differently. As an undergraduate, I did a mini research project into gender differences in writing, and my Master’s dissertation focused on how our language choices change with age. And as I get older myself, I'm conscious of the new language I adopt, or don't. I often wonder if there's a linguistic equivalent of “mutton dressed as lamb”. Are there new ‘trendy’ ‘young’ words or phrases that sound incongruous coming from a middle-aged woman? And I'm not just talking about obvious youth slang that sounds ridiculous coming from an older person. I wouldn't, for example, even attempt to slip skibidi or slay or 6-7 into conversation! I'm talking about the slightly subtler new words or ways of talking about things which I think younger speakers naturally adopt quickly but perhaps take a bit longer to feel comfortable as part of your vocabulary as you get older. Over the past week or so, I've become conscious of two new words that have slipped into my vocabulary.

Last week, I found myself explaining to my mum, who's in her 70s, that a new piece of knitwear I was wearing was called a tank, and that a tank is really just a tank top that's been re-labelled. For most British speakers, certainly of my age, a tank top has connotations of something from the 1970s. If I had access to old family photos, I'd have dug out an old picture of me as a child in a classic 70s tank top. Instead, the image of Wallace from the Aardman Wallace and Gromit animations in his distinctive green tank top will have to suffice. As sleeveless knitwear has come back into fashion, fashion brands, probably wanting to avoid those 70s connotations, have opted for just tank as an alternative term.

The second new term, also a shortening, that's taken me longer to slip into is socials. As an observer of language, I know that we started off with ‘social networking’, which soon became ‘social media’ and then got shortened to just ‘socials’. The short form has been around for quite a few years now and in fact, I mentioned it in a couple of talks about language change I did in 2020. Back then, though, I felt a bit awkward using it myself – it didn't quite come naturally. Recently though, I've increasingly noticed myself using it unselfconsciously as it's eased its way into my idiolect. 

Then earlier this week, I found myself reading an academic paper about sociodemographics and attitudinal and personality predictors of lexical change (yes, really!). It’s based on research not into English, but Swiss German, and specifically dialect words and how their usage has changed over time. I don’t think the findings quite map onto English, at least not onto the kind of language change I was talking about above, because the discussion is tied up with quite specific cultural identities and the unique linguistics of Switzerland. However, one of the key findings of the study did pique my interest and got me thinking. The researchers found that it wasn’t just the obvious demographic factors, such as age, gender or educational background, that affected speakers’ use of different words, but that individual personality traits and attitudes also played a significant role in whether speakers adopted or resisted new words.

It got me thinking about the different people I know, meet or interact with and their varying attitudes to new words and language trends. The ones who are, like me, generally welcoming of (or at least neutral about) change and those who are more resistant. Which combinations of demographic factors, personality traits and attitudes shape the ways we view new language both as it’s used by others and that we’re comfortable to adopt ourselves? What factors do you think most affect your own idiolect, the way you view new language, and whether you’re an adopter or a resister?

 

Refs:
Leeman, Kistler, & Tomaschek (2026) “Beyond Sociodemographics: Attitudinal and Personality Predictors of Lexical Change” in Languages 11(3)

The academic article is fairly long and quite dense. I admit that I mostly read the intro and the discussion/conclusions and skipped the details in between. But if you have the patience, I think it contains some really interesting ideas. It’s also open access here.

Lexical layers 3: idiolect and finding your voice

Ever since I started getting interested in language, I've been intrigued by variation. For my undergraduate dissertation, I looked into differences between the way men and women use language. My MA dissertation looked at the effects of speaker age on the type of language we use – I found some surprising similarities between the youngest (teens) and oldest (70+) age groups.  Then when I recently dipped into the study of Forensic Linguistics, I read a lot about the concept of idiolect and how each individual's language use is shaped by a whole host of factors. This might include their gender and age, their social, cultural, educational and professional background, their social and political attitudes, where they grew up and have lived through their life and of course, their L1 and influences from other languages they speak.

Over time, we all acquire a slightly different set of vocabulary and we develop our own preferences about words and phrases we use and don't use, where, when and to whom. Some of those choices are quite conscious and considered, especially when it comes to sensitive areas like swearing and taboo or culturally sensitive topics. A lot of our choices though are largely unconscious. For example, do you mostly say thank you, thanks, ta or cheers? Or maybe something else altogether? Does it depend on the context or the person you're speaking to? Are there any of these that aren't within your personal idiolect? Personally, I'm not much of a cheers person. As a carefully-spoken, middle-class, middle-aged woman, it always feels a bit awkward to me. However, just occasionally, if I'm trying to sound a bit less posh and a bit more blokey, say speaking to a builder or a white van man, I sometimes slip in a "cheers, mate!" - always reverting slightly towards the London accent I grew up with. That might sound a bit patronizing, but in fact, it's a perfectly normal reaction and even has a technical name; accommodation (or more specifically convergence). But that's getting away from my point …

What does all this have to do with language learners? Let me give you a couple of examples. When I was at school my French teacher (an L1 French speaker) would sometimes exclaim in class when we were stuck on a question – "That's easy peasy, lemon squeezy!" We'd all laugh, in part, because it just sounded funny in her fairly strong French accent, but also because it's typically a childish expression you wouldn't expect a teacher to use.  Of course, she was well aware of what she was doing, it was a conscious choice to deflate a slightly tense atmosphere and it worked a treat.

My second example is of a student I taught several years ago. He was a late-teen, German L1 student visiting the UK. His English was good (B2+), he was keen to pick up spoken expressions and he would regularly use cheers to mean thank you. He (mostly) used it appropriately, but there was something about his accent and very precise articulation that made him sound like a very posh public school-boy clinking a champagne glass. I had to stifle a laugh every time he said it just because it sounded so incongruous.

Developing your own voice in a second language is tricky and no one wants to sound silly, but at the same time, we don't want learners to get overly self-conscious and never attempt to use new language. The good news, as I mentioned in my first post, is that a lot of basic, high-frequency language is, almost by definition, fairly safe and neutral which makes getting started relatively uncomplicated. It's as students progress and are increasingly exposed to a range of authentic language that more caution is needed. A quirky expression picked up from an online video that might be appropriate for the middle-aged male presenter in his local North London pub with his mates isn't necessarily going to sound right coming from a 20-something young woman on the other side of the world who drops it in with the American English she learnt at school!

That's not to say that we should be shielding students from all but the blandest, 'standard' English. Far from it! We should though be actively exploring the layers of meaning that the language they meet might hold. That doesn't necessarily have to involve explaining in detail all the possible subtle nuances of meaning and usage of a particular word, but at least flagging up language that students need to be careful about using. Emphasizing that they need to really get to know a word or expression, who typically uses it and when before they try it out for themselves. Synonyms can't just be substituted because they 'mean the same'. The language of journalism is intentionally colourful to draw in readers and may not work in a formal essay or a work email. The latest edgy youth slang will sound comical from a middle-aged mum. People generally use idioms for effect, to be playful or humorous, to play down the seriousness of a situation or to exaggerate it – writing "Hitler had a bee in his bonnet about the Jews" in a school essay (yes, that's a real example from a real student essay!) doesn't work on all kinds of levels!

In this series of posts, I've tried to move from the more obvious, broad-brush, outer layers of meaning, with basic distinctions of register and genre, down to the subtler, more difficult-to-define nuances of individual usage. These aren't issues that will crop up in every vocab set with every class, but if we don't explain this stuff where it is relevant, we're only telling half the story and we're seriously short-changing our students.

Piggies & puddies

One of the things I've always loved about the English language is its flexibility; its capacity to be moulded and adapted by the people who use it. Of course, it's used in an infinite variety of ways across the globe, but also at a more personal level, everyone has their own idiolect; their own unique range of vocabulary and style of speaking.

Last weekend, we spent a few days away with my parents and in the car on the way back, my boyfriend was commenting on the language we use together as a family; our familiolect, if you like. Every family has their own collection of in-jokes and phrases, picked up over the years. Some come from identifiable sources - my family grew up with Monty Python and various words and phrases (any reference to varieties of cheese or dead parrots, for example) trigger automatic responses. Others have become lost in the mists of time.

We also have our own vocabulary. Within my family, when we're together, we refer to feet as "pigs" or "piggies". It's a usage I'm sure is familiar to many people from the children's rhyme -"This little piggy went to market"- played, of course, using a child's toes and so, by extension, used to mean toes or feet. But we've also always referred to hands as "puds" or "puddies" (to rhyme with 'buddy') going back through my grandmother. For years, I'd presumed it was made up, until I finally came across it in the Oxford English Dictionary:

pud (noun)
a child's word for: the hand or the forefoot of an animal; a little hand or paw. Now rare.


One thing's for sure though - I know exactly where my inability to speak without using my puddies comes from - like mother, like daughter ...