Children as agents of language change

Abstract

This paper explores the operation of child language acquisition as a critical factor in some forms of language change. It proposes a sociohistorical model that incorporates the potential for young children to function as linguistic agents in certain environments, characterized by unpredictable variation in the input, lack of normative mechanisms, and the possibility for the emergence of peer networks among children. The model is then applied to explain a well-documented but poorly understood phonological change in the history of Latin American Spanish: the simplification of the system of sibilants in 16th-century Colonial Spanish. This change was nestled in ecological environments characterized by intense contact among L1 and L2 speakers of several varieties of Iberian and non-Iberian languages, as well as the rapid breakdown and reshaping of social networks. We argue that, in the absence of strong normative pressures, the advantages of certain options for early acquisition were crucial in the eventual creation and generalization of a new sociolinguistic norm. This study is methodologically innovative in that it combines not just archival evidence and sociohistorical information, but also present-day acquisitional data. The latter offers a piece often missing in sociohistorical accounts of language change.