Accommodation Signifiers: How Languages Are Transformed into New Ones

 Accommodation Theory says that we tend to mimic the expressions, gestures, and vocal patterns of people we like, strengthening our bonds between them.  We accommodate their nuances of language into our own, either because we find them charming, clever, or amusing, etc.  I'd like to expand on this theory by proposing that it's responsible for the shifting of most, if not all, languages in the world.  How it happens is an originator "invents" a certain style of speaking, whether they are aware of it or not, and if it catches on it may spread through a region and literally contribute to the language everyone is speaking. 

Think about someone you met who had such an attractive speech pattern that it changed your own.  Maybe you only spoke that way around this person, which is often the case, but it's possible that you started speaking that way around others too.  And if so, maybe they found it attractive the same way you did.  If it kept spreading, then in theory this one style of speaking could affect the entire population of a community.  Similarly, new words become invented when the friends of the inventor latch onto them.  [Words like selfie and twerk had to come from somewhere, didn't they?]  They can use these words in their own vocabulary and spread them around to other social groups, which may continue to spread them, like a chain reaction, until they become a regional attraction.  By the same token, expressions, dialects, and accents will spread if enough people latch onto them. 

Each of these inventions of language are what I call Accommodation Signifiers.  Often there will be many different signifiers acting on a language at once.  Certainly, they don't always come from the same person; rather, they come from a great number of people in different social groups throughout the region in which a language is changing.  I believe the sum of all these signifiers is what modifies languages, causing them to change into new ones once a community becomes isolated from its previous nation of speakers, where the language they'd once spoken had been more universally distributed.  For example: after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin- its original language- got broken up into regional dialects like Spanish, French, and Italian.  Each of these regions had their own signifiers, which morphed Latin into all the languages we know that evolved from it.  This phenomenon can be likened to the way animals evolve once they are isolated from the rest of their species.  Culture takes its course in the same way nature does.