The Italian word graffito scratch has been in use in English for well over a century usually in the

The Italian word graffito, "scratch", has been in use in English for well over a century, usually in the plural graffiti, meaning "scratches or scribbles on walls".The "infectious disease" view is that we somehow "catch" changes from those around us, and that we ought to fight such diseases. Change is indeed brought about through social contact, so the catching notion is not wrong But the disease metaphor falls down People pick up changes because they want to. They want to fit in with social groups, and they adapt their hairstyle, clothes, and language, to those of people they admire, as with the Jocks and Burnouts, teenagers in a suburban high school in Detroit Adapting to those around is normal human behaviour. In Nothern Ireland, east Belfast men and west Belfast women both showed a tendency to pronounce "grass" as "grawss" at a time when in theory, the two halves of Belfast barely talked to one another What could have been happening? The mind boggles But the explanation was quite simple. East Belfast men sometimes visited a city-centre store staffed by mainly west Belfast women. It's well known that shop assistants match their speech to that of their customers, and this is what was happening. The shop assistants were then transferring the pronunciation to their friends.Changes aren't random.

They take hold only if the language is predisposed to move in a particular direction. Social contact can trigger a change only if it was already likely to happen. At any time, in any language, a number of potential change-points exist. Consonants at the end of words are a recurring weak spot in languages, since ends of words are pronounced with less force than beginnings: it's Kick, not kiCK. In British English, "t" at the end of words is eroding, moving from street to stree(t) and in the long run, it'll be stree.Over time, end-of-word consonants may largely disappear, as has happened in some dialects of Chinese, several Polynesian languages, and nearer at hand, in French and Italian, where most words now end in vowels: Una bottiglia di vino bianco, "a bottle of white wine". Oddly, people who dislike this change often praise languages such as Italian as being "beautiful" even though many Italian words are simply Latin without their endings: Italian vino, "wine", was once Latin vinum.The media are often blamed for change, but their role is indirect. Newspapers can popularise new words such as "bonk", "yomp" and "wimp", and radio and television can influence attitudes towards language.

These days, they send the sensible but indirect message that it's all right to talk in different ways: Lenny Henry, Janet Street-Porter, Cilla Black and others show that variety is the spice of linguistic life Variety is the key to language change. Earlier in the century, an old mutation viewpoint prevailed, that some sounds slowly turned into others, like tadpoles gradually changing into frogs. According to a newer view, variant forms arise, each used in a different area or speech style. Then one of the newcomers gets used more and more and gradually ousts the older form, like a young cuckoo heaving an existing bird out of the nest.In some situations, a whole nestful of young cuckoos compete with each other and with older forms They may squabble for a long time until one wins out This process is clearest in the case of vocabulary.