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In urban settings, language change occurs due to the combination of three factors: the diversity of languages spoken, the high population density, and the need for communication. Urban vernaculars, urban contact varieties, and multiethnolects emerge in many cities around the world as a result of language change in urban settings.
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.
After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has undergone pejoration.
Cyclic drift is the mechanism of long-term evolution that changes the functional characteristics of a language over time, such as the reversible drifts from SOV word order to SVO and from synthetic inflection to analytic observable as typological parameters in the syntax of language families and of areal groupings of languages open to investigation over long periods of time.
In linguistics, reappropriation, reclamation, or resignification [1] is the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. It is a specific form of a semantic change (i.e., change in a word's meaning).
In psycholinguistics, semantic processing is the stage of language processing that occurs after one hears a word and encodes its meaning: the mind relates the word to other words with similar meanings. Once a word is perceived, it is placed in a context mentally that allows for a deeper processing.
Etymology studies the history of words: when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. Words may enter a language in several ways, including being borrowed as loanwords from another language, being derived by combining pre-existing elements in the language, by a hybrid known as phono ...
In linguistics, borrowing is a type of language change in which a language or dialect undergoes change as a result of contact with another language or dialect. In typical cases of borrowing, speakers of one language (the "recipient" language) adopt into their own speech a novel linguistic feature that they were exposed to due to its presence in a different language (the "source" or "donor ...