s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld
languages. Such contact may be due to travel, exploration, or conquest or it may be due to
exposure to the donor language in the mass media, foreign language instruction, and the like.
The above quotation only supports the claim that any language undergoes
changes including the change and increase of vocabulary. Hans-Jürgen Diller
(2011: 249), in turn, argues that:
In his Explaining Language Change, Croft (2000: 82f.) identifies two kinds of “directional
[language] evolution at a … global level.” One of them is “a massive increase of
vocabulary;” this he attributes to “technological advances of the past century which require
the naming of new entities.” The other is an increase in “syntactic complexity” which he
attributes to “the advent of writing”.
The latter reason is outside the scope of this paper, although it is reasonable
to suspect that the advent of writing is responsible not only for increased complexity
but also for the growth of the lexicon. Nevertheless, Diller (2011: 250)
further observes that:
The growth of the English lexicon is a fairly continuous trend that can be observed from
about the year 1200, not only in the 19th century … The dent at 1200 is clearly due to the
interruption of the written transmission of English in the wake of the Norman Conquest.
“New entities” have to be named not only in the field of technological advances, but
whenever new concepts emerge. I use the word emerge advisedly: a new word is introduced
not only when a new concept is explicitly introduced in a manner which resembles the
introduction of a technical product. It is also introduced when traditional words are quite
vaguely felt to be insufficient.
2. The position of English
In the past English exerted no impact on other languages. Therefore, the
famous observation of an English writer expressed in the 16th century, cited by
Otto Jespersen (1948: 227): “The English tongue is of small reach stretching no
further than this island of ours, nay not there over all” was of no surprise.
It has to be said that the position of English was to be changed only in the
course of the 19th century and later (especially after World War II) when it
became a donor language to a number of European tongues. This was due to the
growth of the British Empire, the industrial revolution which took place in England,
as well as the subsequent economic development and success of the United
States of America. These are the reasons why England is often referred to by
some linguists as the Word Bank of English (cf. Mańczak-Wohlfeld 2007: 18).