Internally motivated change

Although independent of grammar, sound changes might well have important consequences for the grammatical system. A good example is the extreme erosion of final consonants in French, which has left singular and plural sounding identical in many cases. Labov (1994: 569) quotes a speech by Charles De Gaulle in Madagascar in which he states: ‘Je m’adresse aux peuples français – au pluriel’ (‘I address the French peoples – in the plural’), clearly feeling the need to add ‘au pluriel’ because singular au peuple and plural aux peuples  are homophonous.

While we cannot predict which changes will happen and when, some changes do appear to be more natural than others. Internally motivated changes of this kind often result in reduced articulatory effort on the part of the speaker, as in the examples below: