The Time Course of Language Change

This paper presents a numeric and information theoretic model for themeasuring of language change, without specifying the particular type ofchange. It is shown that this measurement is intuitively plausibleand that meaningful measurements canbe made from as few as 1000 characters. This measurement techniqueis extended to the task of determining the ``rate'' of language changebased on an examination of brief excerpts from the NationalGeographic Magazine and determining both their linguistic distancefrom one another as well as the number of years of temporal separation.A statistical analysis of these results shows, first, that language changecan be measured, and second, that the rate of languagechange has not been uniform, and that in particular, the period 1939-;1948had particularly slow change, while 1949-;1958 and 1959-;1968 hadparticularly rapid changes.

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