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Jean Aitchison
Born	Jean Margaret Aitchison 1938 (80 years)
Nationality	British
Occupation(s)	Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford
Known for	Her work in socio-historical linguistics, Language and mind and Language and the media

Jean Aitchison (born 3rd July 1938) is a British linguist, widely known for her work in language change and language and the mind. She is a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. She has now retired from teaching and has published a series of books on her works.

Biography

Aitchison was educated at the all girl school, Wimbledon High School, in South-East London. She continued her teaching aspirations at Cambridge University, where she earned her MA. After this, she was successful at achieving her AM from Radcliffe College at Harvard. As a result of this, she began her teaching career as a lecturer in Greek at Bedford College London (1961-65), and then moved on to become a lecturer and reader in linguistics at the London School of Economics (1965-92). A year after leaving the London School of Economics, Aitchison moved on to become the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and communication at Oxford University (1993-2003), as well as a Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford (1993-2003). Aitchison retired from teaching in 2003, but has since held her titles at Oxford University.

Main Theories

Language change

Perhaps her most well-known piece of linguistic theory, Aitchison placed a neutral view on language change and proposed three metaphors.

1. The Infectious Disease Model: This metaphor suggests that language change is occurring because people are 'catching' it from one another. Consequently, these changes to the language spread 'like a disease', causing a large impact on the English Language. This kind of change continues through social contact as more and more people pick it up from others and continue to use it. Aitchison argues that people 'spread' and pick up non-standard features which gradually become used more frequently by a larger number of people. A linguistic example of this kind of language change may include the spread of neologisms such as, 'Brexit'.
2. The Damp Spoon Model: This model describes language change as being a result of peoples laziness. The metaphor originates from people being lazy and putting a damp spoon into the sugar bowl, instead of getting another spoon. Language features such as dropping an apostrophe and contracting words incorrectly, are examples of language change that could be linked to people's laziness. The majority of the time, peoples language choices become lazy to save time or to be more efficient.
3. The Crumbling Castle Model: Aitchison uses this model to imply that language was once 'a beautiful castle' which has slowly 'crumbled' due to changes to the language. This model also suggests that the language needs to be preserved and any changes should be prevented from happening. However, Aitchison argues that it is expected that overtime words or phrases will drop out of use due to them not being used as frequently anymore.

Child Acquisition

Aitchison also worked in 1987 to identify three stages that occur during a child's acquisition of vocabulary. She argues that when a child is successful at completing all of these stages, they will have an understanding of the English lexicon. Most importantly, she argues that there is no exact date that a child reaches a certain level of language learning. The speed at which a child reaches the different stages is influenced by both innate abilities and the environment which they grow up in. For example, some children learn language through imitation, where the role of the caregiver (e.g. a parent) is vital in their language development.

1. Labelling: This is the first stage that a child will go through when learning lexis. It involves making the link between the sounds of particular words and the objects to which they refer to. For example, a child understanding that "daddy" refers to the child's father.
2. Packaging: This stage requires the child to understand the range of meaning that a word can have.
3. Network Building: The final stage requires the child to grasp the connections between different words. For example, how some words can be opposite in meaning (e.g. "big" and "small").

Aitchison also proposed a Timetable of Speech, from birth to ten years old, providing a recommendation for the age at which the majority of children learn language.

• Children grasp the use of single words at the age of 12 months e.g. 'more' and 'yeah'
• By the age of 2, children begin to show an understanding of word endings. However, this is a more difficult stage because there are so many irregular verb endings in the English Language, for example.
• Aitchison argues that during the age of 2, a child develops the ability to form negatives and to ask questions e.g. 'Why didn't I caught it?'
• By the age of 5, the child is able to use complex constructions and makes few errors.

Books

Jean Aitchison has published a series of works over her career, including:

• New media Language - published in 2003 by Routledge
• Word in the mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon - published in 2003 by Basil Blackwell
• Language change: Progress or Decay? - published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press
• The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics - published in 1998 by Routledge
• The language web: The power and problem of words - published in 1997 by Cambridge University Press
• The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution - published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press
• Linguistics - published in 1999 by Hodder & Stoughton, Teach yourself books
• Introducing language and mind - published in 1992 by Penguin Publishing.

Language Change: Progress or Decay?

Originally published in 1981, Language Change: Progress or Decay?, is arguably Aitchison's most popular book. Since its first publication, the book has grown from fourteen to seventeen chapters and was re-published by The Cambridge University Press in 2001. Aitchison provides a neutral view on whether language change is a sign of language progression or decay, therefore engaging a wide audience of readers. The book begins by discussing the inevitability of language change, the methods of historical linguistics, and the study of language variation. In addition, she considers a variety of social factors which may have had an impact on the spread of language change. For example, she discusses prestige, gender and race, as well as building upon the previous works of the likes of William Labov. Furthermore, she continues to discuss the wide range of factors which may be responsible for the change, such as fashion, foreign influence, social need and naturalness. Aitchison also closely looks at the birth and death of language and explores the impact of pidgins, creoles, assimilation, and code-switching.

New Media Language

Aitchison's New Media Language takes a closer look at the relationship between today's media and the language, by bringing together media figures and leading scholars. Divided into four sections with five chapters, the book investigates how newspapers, television, email, the Internet, and text messaging have affected, and been affected by, language. In addition, New Media Language explores the important implications of the changes that the developing media has bought about.

Reith Lectures

Each year, BBC Radio 4 invites a current leading figure in to deliver a series of lectures on the radio. In 1996, Jean Aitchison took part and produced a five part series.

1. Episode 1: The Language Web - The main focus of the first lecture was a chronological explanation of the differing arguments surrounding whether language change has a positive (change) or negative impact (decay) on the English Language. Aitchison it makes clear that "correct English" is very difficult to define, particularly in the 18th century as middle and upper class speech was often praised as "good". In order to provide sufficient examples to support the different arguments, Aitchison referred to her own three metaphors: crumbling castle, damp spoon syndrome and infectious disease. Firstly, with the damp spoon syndrome metaphor referring to peoples laziness with language, Aitchison argues that the only form of lazy speech in English is drunken speech, so therefore the English Language is not being affected like this. Secondly, Aitchison also provides arguments against the crumbling castle metaphor, suggesting that there is no definite year that can be labelled as the year the English Language reached peak perfection. Finally, she provides further insight into the infectious disease metaphor suggesting that linguistic change occurs because people want to try and fit in with social groups, so therefore they change their language to try and fit that of their desired social group (convergence).
   In the first of this series of lectures, Aitchison also introduces her 'cuckoo' theory. This theory can be applied to vocabulary and pronunciation. In terms of vocabulary, when variant forms arise, each one gets used in a different area or in a different style. Eventually, one of the new lexical items gets used more and more often and gradually replaces the older form. This happens just like a young cuckoo has to remove an existing bird out of the nest. A similar process also happens with the pronunciation of words such as 'butter' and its 'bu'er' variant, which are competing in English.
2. Episode 2: A Web of Deceit - The second instalment in this short lecture series discusses the origins of language, which is something that has become a serious field of study in the last ten years. More recently, new ideas have provided a fresh way of looking at how language started. She states that the main purpose humans use language for is to keep in touch with one another, and to create a series of webs of friendships. Aitchison discusses the idea that language is good at transferring only some types of information, in particular it is good at negative reports such as, "No buses will run on Sunday". In contrast, she also discusses the types of information sharing that language is not good at communicating. For example, spatial information, where instructions like travel directions would be much clearer if pointed out on a map. Similarly, she argues that language is also bad at expressing pain or emotion.
   Aitchison continues by discussing phenoniums such as turn-taking which often starts early in a humans life. She argues that turn-taking has become a sort of ritual in which people just naturally partake in.
   In addition, Aitchison also states that humans use language to influence and persuade one another. She continues by comparing humans use of language and communication to that of animals like birds. In order to successfully use language to communicate, humans have to combine all of these different 'webs' and use a complex sound structure.
3. Episode 3: Building the Web - The third lecture is largely focused on the different stages that children acquire different aspects of language. It is important to remember that all children learn language at different stages, so these are only guidelines set out by Aitchison instead. She begins by stating that children are able to learn language so quickly because they instinctively know the 'language web' and this is also both help and hindered by adults. Also, at each stage a child is naturally inclined to learn some particular aspect of language. According to Aitchison, in the first few weeks babies mostly cry. From six weeks onwards, infants learn to coo which eventually develops into the babbling of language-like sounds at around six months of age. By 18 months, the majority of children have discovered the naming insight and are able to name objects and people. Here the role of the caregiver is important as children tend to extract rules from the speech of people around them. Next, by the age of 3 children are able to utter long sentences. However, at this stage, mistakes are still common, in particular with things such as pronouns. After these mistakes are learnt and corrected, children are usually able to talk freely by around three and a half years of age.
4. Episode 4: A Web of Words - The fourth lecture focuses solely on the complexity of words in the English Language. Most importantly, she discusses the idea that up until recently both the sheer size and the importance of our internal dictionaries has been underestimated. Far more words exist now than they did in Shakespeare's time and many speakers today probably know twice as many words as he did. She estimates that a native speaker of English knows approximately 50,000 individual words. She also provides some estimates of the different ages at which children acquire words. For example, she predicts that by the age of five, most English-speaking children ca use 500 words. This number increases rapidly, including long and complex ones. By the age of 13, this total number of words increases to around 20,000 and 50,000 or more by the age of 20. Aitchison also predicts that a typical university student can use the equivalent of two-thirds of the Oxford Dictionary. This number is considered to be as high as 75,000 words. To summarise, Aitchison estimates that between the ages of 5 and 20 a native English speaker acquires more than 10 new words a day, which is a total of more than 300 a month and well over 3000 a year. Her predictions are based on her ideas that words are woven into a complex web which has multiple links, allowing humans to remember so many words. Obviously, humans don't just remember old words, but they also have the ability to coin new ones.
5. Episode 5: The World Wide Web - Aitchison begins this final lecture by looking at language in comparison to that of animals. She argues that animals are linguistically limited compared to humans who have the ability to produce and understand any number of new words and sentences. However, the focus of the lecture looks at how this ability humans have also can involve some problems. For example, she looks at how gobbledegook is used and how it can sometimes be confused with technical vocabulary; medical terms and politically correct terms. The main reason humans use gobbledegook, she argues, is due to a lack of time and care.
   During the lecture Aitchison also briefly looks at gender stereotypes in language, in particular the use of 'he' and how most people assume that it refers primarily to men.
   Next, Aitchison studies in depth the idea of metaphors and how they have quite possibly misshaped our views about how language works because successful metaphors have to be both ear-catching but sufficiently ordinary in order to be acceptable.
   As a closing to her series of lectures, Aitchison provides a summary of her thoughts discussed in the previous lectures. Overall, she believes that we need to understand language and to try not to control it. She also provides an interesting thought on the 'problem' of language loss. She states a series of statistics related to this issue: "Ninety pre cent of the world's languages may be in danger. Around 6,000 languages are currently spoken in the world. Of these, half are moribund in that they are no longer learned by the new generation of speakers. A further 2,500 are in a danger zone in that they have fewer than 100,000 speakers. This leaves around 10 per cent of the current total as likely survivors a century from now". These statistics strongly help provide evidence to Aitchison's closing statement that we must worry about words because we will forever be using them everyday, but this must be handled in the right way.

Interviews

In 2015, Aitchison took part in an interview for Studfiles, in which she discussed the positive impact that new words entering the English Language has had on the language, and argues against the idea that this had had a damaging effect. The information below consists of the series of questions Aitchison was asked, and a brief summary of her response to each.

1. About a billion people worldwide speak the English language today. Is that something to celebrate or is it a cause for concern?
   In response to this question, Aitchison holds the view that the English Language spreading is just something that has happened, and that could not be prevented or sped up. She suggests that the main reason for such a drastic spread of the English Language was because England gained more political power, with a similar thing happening to America and Latin.
   
2. You mention the way English has been pulling in words constantly from other languages. Now, is it appropriate for a language to be quite so much of a mish-mash? How pure is English and do we need linguistic purity?
   Aitchison answers this particular question by comparing the English Language to that of the French and how both languages borrow words from other languages. She continues by saying that this process of borrowing is a natural process that can not be stopped or controlled. She says that the borrowing of words is something that she finds interesting and enjoys studying the words which the English Language chooses to borrow from other languages.
3. When we talk about linguistic standardization, with the growth of English as a global language, isn't it true that it's not really anything of the sort because people of different countries and cultures speak English in a different way? And so it's really almost a different language wherever its spoken?
   The important factor in response to this question is the idea of intercommunication.This means that English is used as a global language because people are able to communicate with each other. Obviously there are remote parts of the world where people make up and use their own varieties of English and these never come in contact with anyone else. Overall, Aitchison argues that the English Language does change and become different in order to become a standardized linguistic variety.
   
4. Is there a need for rules to govern the use of English and if there is a need for rules, who would actually police them?
   Here, Aitchison refers to Samuel Johnson and his first dictionary, which was published in 1755. Included in the dictionary was a preface which showed Johnsons goal of trying to 'fix' the English Language. However, he concludes after putting together his dictionary, that it is not possible for anyone to 'police' a language or to try and prevent it from changing. Aitchison seems to share similar ideas to Johnson.
   
5. Do we need English grammar, or is it just communication that is important and one doesn't need to worry about whether one's saying something correctly?
   In order to answer this question, Aitchison describes what she believes to be the two main usages of grammar. Firstly, that grammar is innate in peoples brains, so therefore there is no way to stop people using it (this is a similar theory to that of Noam Chomsky). Secondly, she talks about the prescriptive use of grammar where from the 18th century onwards people would say what they thought they ought to say, rather than what they actually wanted to say.
   
6. What are the biggest influences for change on the English Language today?
   In her answer, Aitchison argues that the biggest influence for change on the English Language is globalization because all other influences only help to push the English Language towards the direction it would have eventually gone anyway.

External Links

• University of Oxford
• BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures