"Move over Shakespeare, teen girls are the real language disruptors"

"As Katherine Martin, head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, has pointed out, if Shakespeare was inventing dozens of new words per play, how would his audience have understood him? Rather, it’s likely that Shakespeare had an excellent grasp of the vernacular and was merely writing down words that his audience was already using.

So if Shakespeare wasn’t disrupting the English language, who was? And how did we get from Shakespearean English to the version we speak now? That’s right: young women.

A pair of linguists, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the University of Helsinki, conducted a study that combed through 6,000 personal letters written between 1417 and 1681...

In 11 out of the 14 changes, they found that female letter-writers were changing the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers. In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time...

The role that young women play as language disruptors is so well-established at this point it’s practically boring to sociolinguists. The founder of modern sociolinguistics, William Labov, observed that women lead 90% of linguistic change—in a paper he wrote 25 years ago. Researchers continue to confirm his findings...

we do know that young women tend to be more socially aware, more empathetic, and more concerned about how their peers perceive them. This may translate into a greater facility for linguistic disruption. Women also tend to have larger social networks, which means they’re more likely to be exposed to a greater diversity of language innovations."

http://qz.com/474671/move-over-shakespeare-teen-girls-are-the-real-language-disruptors/