Influences on language change

• Media - Printing press ( Caxton 1476), television and internet has forced standardization to occur in order for the wider audience to be reached. The media has also invented new words to describe contemporary situatuons such as the initialism "WAG".
• Technology - Scientific advances in 18th and 19th century brought with them lots of new lexical terms, these were influenced by Latin and Greek lexis such as "biology".
• Food
• Travel - People were able to move to live and to travel and with them they took language which was absorbed into the local community, which can eventually spread. Travel has added more 'borrowed' words into society to accommodate for new cultural experiences such as "curry".
• Politics
• Culture
• War and miltary - The Norman conquest and the Germanic tribes who invaded over 1000 years ago had a huge impact on the language that we use today. Without the presence of war we wouldn't need lexis to describe certain events like the euphemism "friendly fire" and "collateral damage".
• Slavery
• Global events
• Law and crime
• BBC
• Trade and industry - New lexis has had to be created for the new inventions that have been created. The trade between countries is the reason that certain words are the same or similar in different countries as it was easier to do business, this further helped standardization.
• Social and cultural changes - Different views have been formed with different cultural changes which has influenced new lexical choices. However there is a need to be politically correct and this has influenced language change as certain words can no longer be used such as the replacement of "Eskimo" with "Inuits".