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The Regurgitation of Language

Repeated patterns in linguistics

Chelsea Renee MAT
2 min readAug 12, 2020
Photo by Mat Reding on Unsplash

Like many parts of life, language has a cycle. Within that cycle is “language birth, language and dialect endangerment, language death, language maintenance as well as language survival” (Denham & Lobeck, 2013).

Noam Chomsky best explores the birth of a language by postulating that “human beings possess an innate capacity for complex language” (Denham & Lobeck, 2013). This theory is the belief that human beings are hard-wired for language (Denham & Lobeck, 2013).

Another part of the cycle of language and dialect is endangerment. This cycle may occur if a group of people is separated and rebuild a community independent of each other. Over time, the language may change, along with the way the words are pronounced.

The death of a language occurs when the last native speaker of a language dies (Nordquist, 2019). In contrast, language maintenance is present when a language is in competition with another language that is more powerful (Language Maintenance, Shift, and Survival). Language survival is a conscious effort to keep a language known to others (Denham & Lobeck, 2013).

Language shift “means the process, or the event, in which a population changes from using one language to another” (Oxford Bibliographies, 2019). It is significant…

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Chelsea Renee MAT
Chelsea Renee MAT

Written by Chelsea Renee MAT

Everyday mortal, person, human, eccentric, unconventional, educated, and most importantly, open-minded.

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