Evaluative essay on language diversity or language change

Welcome to Paper 2 Section A: Language Diversity and Change

Welcome to your complete revision guide for Paper 2 Section A of the AQA A-Level English Language (7702) course. This exam paper is titled Language Diversity and Change (7702/2). Don't worry if the evaluative essay feels intimidating at first—once you master the core debates, linguistic concepts, and essay structure, you will have all the tools you need to write a top-band response!

Let's begin by breaking down exactly how the exam works and what the examiners are looking for.

Exam Essentials: What You Need to Know

• The Exam: Paper 2 is a 2-hour 30-minute written exam worth 100 marks total (40% of your total A-level).
• The Choice: In Section A, you are given a choice between two questions (Question 1 or Question 2). You must answer one.
• The Scope: One question will focus on an issue of Language Diversity (such as gender, accent and dialect, sociolect, ethnicity, or occupation). The other question will focus on Language Change or World Englishes (such as historical/contemporary shifts from c. 1600 to the present day, technology, or global varieties of English).
• Closed-Book Task: You are provided with no texts, data, or stimulus material in Section A. You must draw upon your own learned linguistic knowledge, case studies, examples, and theoretical research.
• Total Marks: Section A is worth 30 marks.

The Assessment Objectives (AOs): Understanding the Weighting

The marks are split between two Assessment Objectives:

• AO1 (10 marks): Apply linguistic methods, concepts, and terminology accurately. Identify linguistic patterns and write with coherence, fluency, and academic clarity.
• AO2 (20 marks): Demonstrate critical understanding of concepts and issues relevant to language diversity and change. Evaluate theories, research, models, and real-world social contexts.

Top Tip: Notice that AO2 is worth double AO1 (\(20 \text{ marks vs } 10 \text{ marks}\)). This means your essay cannot simply be a list of grammatical labels or a descriptive summary of theorists. It must be an argument-driven evaluation that weighs up different viewpoints to reach a nuanced conclusion.

Cracking the Command Word: "Evaluate"

Every Section A question starts with the command word: "Evaluate..." (e.g., "Evaluate the idea that spoken interactions between men and women are characterised by difference..." or "Evaluate the idea that technology is driving rapid change in the English language...").

To evaluate means to:

1. Weigh up the evidence: Present arguments that support the statement, but also provide robust counter-arguments.
2. Challenge assumptions: Ask yourself: Is the theory outdated? Was the sample size flawed? Does context matter more than broad categories?
3. Synthesise and conclude: Offer a reasoned personal judgement that answers the prompt directly rather than sitting on the fence.

Option 1: Language Diversity Core Knowledge

If you choose the diversity question, you will need to evaluate how factors such as gender, region, social class, ethnicity, and occupation shape language use.

1. Gender and Spoken Interaction

Gender research has evolved dramatically over the last 50 years. You can think of it as a journey through four key models:

• The Deficit Model – Robin Lakoff (1975): Argued that women's language contains features such as hedges ("sort of", "kind of"), tag questions ("isn't it?"), empty adjectives ("lovely", "divine"), and over-polite forms. Lakoff claimed these features reflect women's social insecurity and subordinate position in society.
Evaluation: Lakoff relied on personal observation rather than empirical data. Her work assumes male speech is the default "norm" and female speech is deficient.

• The Dominance Model – Pamela Fishman (1983) & Zimmerman and West (1975): Explores how male dominance is enacted in conversation.
- Zimmerman and West (1975): In a small sample of mixed-sex conversations, they found that 96% of all interruptions were made by men.
- Pamela Fishman (1983): Observed that women do the conversational "shitwork" (e.g., using tag questions and asking questions) to keep conversations alive because men often do not respond or give minimal responses.
Evaluation: Small sample sizes and controlled settings limit the generalisability of early dominance studies. They treat men and women as homogeneous groups rather than looking at individual personality or power.

• The Difference Model – Deborah Tannen (1990): Proposed that men and women belong to different conversational subcultures learned from childhood, leading to different interactional styles across six contrasts:
- Status vs Support (Men seek status/dominance; women seek connection/support)
- Independence vs Intimacy (Men preserve independence; women establish intimacy)
- Advice vs Understanding (Men offer practical solutions; women offer empathy)
- Information vs Feelings (Men exchange data; women build rapport)
- Orders vs Proposals (Men use direct imperatives; women use indirect suggestions)
- Conflict vs Compromise (Men engage in direct conflict; women seek harmony)
Evaluation: While popular, the difference model risks stereotyping and excuses unequal power dynamics as mere "miscommunication".

• Diversity / Dynamic / Social Constructionist Approaches – Deborah Cameron (2007): In The Myth of Mars and Venus, Cameron argues that differences between men's and women's speech are vastly exaggerated by popular culture. Language variation is driven by social context, audience, and individual goals, not biological sex.
• Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet: View gender as a social practice—something people "perform" or "do" within communities of practice, rather than an innate set of linguistic traits.

2. Region and Social Class (Accents & Dialects)

Make sure you distinguish between accent (pronunciation and phonology) and dialect (vocabulary and grammar).

• Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) – Howard Giles (1973): Speakers adjust their language based on their listener:
- Convergence: Moving speech closer to the listener (upward towards standard prestige to sound professional, or downward to build solidarity/rapport).
- Divergence: Moving speech further apart to emphasise social distance or distinct group identity.

• Matched Guise Technique – Howard Giles (1970s): Listeners rated speakers using different accents. Received Pronunciation (RP) scored high for overt prestige (intelligence, competence, authority), while regional non-standard accents scored higher for covert prestige (warmth, friendliness, trustworthiness).

• Social Stratification – William Labov:
- New York Department Store Study (1966): Investigated the post-vocalic /r/ across three department stores (Saks, Macy's, S. Klein). Found that speakers in higher socio-economic brackets used the prestigious post-vocalic /r/ more frequently, showing social stratification.
- Martha's Vineyard (1963): Discovered that local fishermen exaggerated their vowel centralisation (/aw/ and /ay/) to establish a distinct local identity and resist summer tourists.

• Covert Prestige and Social Networks:
- Peter Trudgill (1974 Norwich Study): Studied the non-standard velar nasal [n] vs standard [ŋ] in words ending in -ing (e.g., "walkin'" vs "walking"). Found non-standard forms were more common in lower social classes and among men, who claimed higher non-standard usage due to covert prestige.
- Lesley Milroy (1980 Belfast Study): Explored how social network structure affects dialect. Closed networks (high density and multiplexity—where people live, work, and socialise together) reinforced non-standard local linguistic norms, whereas open networks accelerated language change and standardisation.

3. Ethnicity and Multi-Ethnolects

• Multi-Ethnic Youth British English (MLE): Researched by Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill, and Efrat Kerswill. MLE is a multi-ethnolect originating in diverse, multicultural areas of London.
- Linguistic features: Monophthongal vowel qualities, /h/-retention, colloquial slang terms (e.g., "mandem", "bare"), and distinct prosodic/rhythmic patterns.
- Sociolinguistic significance: MLE functions primarily as a youth in-group code and social dialect based on contact, age, and shared urban identity, rather than strictly on biological ethnicity.

4. Occupation and Sociolect

• Discourse Communities – John Swales (2011): Defined a discourse community as a group with shared common goals, mechanisms of intercommunication, participatory mechanisms to provide information/feedback, specific genre/lexical conventions (jargon), and a threshold level of member expertise.

• Institutional Talk – Drew and Heritage (1992): Identified workplace conversation features that differ from ordinary interaction:
- Goal orientation: Conversations focus on specific tasks.
- Turn-taking rules: Special restrictions on who speaks when (e.g., in courtrooms or classrooms).
- Allowable contributions: Restrictions on what topics can be raised.
- Asymmetry: Unequal power distribution embedded in roles (e.g., doctor vs patient, employer vs employee).

Quick Review: Diversity Key Takeaway: Never treat demographic categories as fixed monoliths. A top-band answer shows how gender, region, ethnicity, and occupation intersect and vary dynamically based on social context and audience.

Option 2: Language Change and World Englishes Core Knowledge

If you choose the language change question, you will explore how English has changed from c. 1600 to the present day (Early Modern English \(\rightarrow\) Late Modern English \(\rightarrow\) Present-Day English) or how it functions globally.

1. Mechanisms of Lexical and Semantic Change

To score high AO1 marks, you must accurately name and exemplify how words are formed and how meanings shift over time:

• Lexical Innovation (Word Creation):
- Neologism / Coinage: Creation of an entirely new word.
- Compounding: Joining two existing words together (e.g., laptop, smartphone).
- Blending: Combining parts of two words (e.g., smog = smoke + fog; brunch = breakfast + lunch).
- Clipping: Shortening a longer word (e.g., phone from telephone, gym from gymnasium).
- Acronyms and Initialisms: Acronyms are pronounced as single words (e.g., NASA, laser); initialisms are pronounced letter-by-letter (e.g., BBC, URL).
- Borrowing / Loanwords: Incorporating words from other languages due to contact, trade, or conquest.
- Conversion / Functional Shift: Changing a word's word class without changing its form (e.g., the noun text becoming the verb to text).
- Affixation / Derivation: Adding prefixes or suffixes to root words (e.g., unfriend, disinformation).

• Semantic Shift (Changes in Meaning):
- Broadening / Generalisation: A word expands to include broader meanings (e.g., holiday originally meant "holy day").
- Narrowing / Specialisation: A word's meaning becomes more specific (e.g., meat once referred to any food).
- Amelioration: A word develops a more positive meaning over time (e.g., nice once meant foolish/ignorant).
- Pejoration: A word develops a more negative meaning over time (e.g., awful originally meant full of awe).
- Metaphorical Extension: A physical concept is applied to abstract domains (e.g., surfing the web, cloud storage).
- Weakening / Bleaching: A word loses its descriptive intensity through overuse (e.g., terrible, literally).

2. Theoretical Models of Language Change

• S-Curve Model – Chen (1968) and Bailey (1973): Explains the pace of change over time. Language change begins slowly among a small group of innovators (initial curve), accelerates rapidly as it gains social momentum and wide adoption (steep upward slope), and finally levels off as it reaches stability across the population (plateau).

• Wave Model – Johannes Schmidt (1872): Suggests that linguistic innovations spread like ripples on a pond radiating outward from an epicenter. As the ripples travel across geographical and social distance, their impact weakens.

• Functional Theory – Michael Halliday: Language changes because society changes. It adapts to meet the communicative, instrumental, and technological needs of its users (e.g., new inventions require new vocabulary).

• Substratum Theory: Language change occurs primarily through language contact, globalisation, migration, borrowing, and dialect mixing.

• Random Fluctuation and Cultural Transmission – Charles Hockett (1958): Language change is not always neat or predictable. Unstable pronunciations, speech errors, and cultural fashions introduce random shifts that become widely adopted over time.

• Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism & Jean Aitchison's Metaphors (1996/2013):
Aitchison deconstructed traditional prescriptivist complaints about language "decay" using three memorable metaphors:
- The Damp Spoon Syndrome: The belief that language change is caused by laziness, sloppiness, or vulgarity (like leaving a wet spoon in the sugar bowl). Aitchison counters that speech changes often optimise articulation and communicative speed.
- The Crumbling Castle View: The belief that the English language was once a perfect historical monument that is now decaying. Aitchison counters that there was never a golden age of linguistic perfection.
- The Infectious Disease Assumption: The idea that "bad" language habits are caught from others like a virus. Aitchison argues people adapt their speech intentionally to fit into social groups.

3. Global Englishes and World Englishes

• Kachru's Three Concentric Circles Model (Braj Kachru, 1985):
- The Inner Circle: Traditional historical bases of English (UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand). Regarded historically as norm-providing.
- The Outer Circle: Post-colonial territories where English serves as a second language (ESL) and an official institutional language (India, Nigeria, Singapore). Characterised as norm-developing.
- The Expanding Circle: Countries where English has no historical or colonial administrative role but is learned as a foreign language (EFL) for global communication, commerce, and science (China, Japan, Germany). Characterised as norm-dependent.
Evaluation: Kachru's model is valuable for historical categorization, but critics note it ignores grey areas, the rise of internet communication, and native-speaker bias.

• Edgar Schneider's Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes (2007): Traces how post-colonial varieties evolve across five successive stages:
1. Foundation: English is introduced to a new territory through colonization or trade.
2. Exonormative Stabilisation: The colonial community uses external standards (e.g., British English norms).
3. Nativisation: Contact leads to bilingualism, borrowing, and the formation of a distinct local identity.
4. Endonormative Stabilisation: The local variety establishes its own internal grammatical and lexical norms and gains social acceptance.
5. Differentiation: The local variety develops its own internal regional and social dialects.

• English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) & David Crystal / Jennifer Jenkins: English acts as a common bridge language among non-native speakers across the globe. Crystal highlights the tension between Mutual Intelligibility (the need to understand one another globally) and Identity (the desire to express local culture and individuality through regional varieties).

Quick Review: Language Change Key Takeaway: Language change is neither progress nor decay—it is adaptation. Always balance prescriptivist anxieties against descriptive linguistic evidence.

Pitfalls to Avoid in Section A

Examiner reports consistently highlight common traps that cost students marks. Keep these essential warnings in mind:

1. "Theory Bombing" / Feature Spotting: Do not just reel off theorists' names and year dates without connecting them directly to the question prompt. A theorist is only valuable if used as an argumentative tool to prove or challenge a specific point.
2. Treating 1970s Models as Absolute Truths: Never cite early deficit or dominance studies (e.g., Lakoff or early Zimmerman and West) as undeniable facts. Always contextualise them as early stages of research that modern linguists (like Deborah Cameron) have qualified or challenged.
3. The AO1 Deficit: Avoid writing a purely philosophical or sociological essay without linguistic evidence. You must cite specific linguistic examples—such as phonetic features (glottal stops, post-vocalic /r/), morphological processes (affixation, blending), or syntactic structures.
4. One-Sided Arguments: A Level 5 response requires nuance. If the prompt claims technology is ruining English, you must explore how technology drives creative linguistic economy, multimodality, and semantic innovation, alongside exploring prescriptivist concerns.
5. Conflating Accent and Dialect: Always maintain precise terminology: accent refers strictly to phonology and sound systems; dialect refers to lexis, semantics, and syntax.
6. Poor Time Management: Remember that Paper 2 also contains Section B (Text Analysis and a 30-mark Directed Writing task). Keep to your timing: spend approximately 45 to 50 minutes on Section A so you leave sufficient time for Section B.

Step-by-Step Evaluative Essay Planning Guide

Follow this simple 4-step structure to craft a cohesive, top-band essay in the exam:

Step 1: Introduction (Define & Situate)
• Unpack the key terms in the question (e.g., standardisation, gender difference, technological change).
• State your overarching thesis clearly: To what extent is the statement valid? Briefly signal the balance of your argument.

Step 2: Supporting Arguments (Explore the Core Claim)
• Introduce theoretical models and case studies that support the proposition.
• Integrate precise linguistic terms and concrete data examples (e.g., specific lexical coinages, phonological markers, or interactional patterns).
• Explain the social, cultural, or historical drivers behind these patterns.

Step 3: Counter-Arguments & Critical Evaluation (Complicate the Debate)
• Introduce alternative models, modern research, or counter-evidence (e.g., juxtaposing Tannen's difference with Cameron's dynamic approach, or contrasting prescriptivist decline with Halliday's functional theory).
• Critique methodological limitations (sample sizes, cultural biases, historical changes).

Step 4: Conclusion (Synthesise & Judge)
• Bring the threads of your argument together into a definitive, nuanced final conclusion.
• Avoid simply repeating your introduction: evaluate which perspective offers the most robust linguistic explanation based on the evidence you have examined.