Inlinguistics, aconservative form, variety, or feature of a language or dialect is one that has changed relatively little across the language's history, or which is relatively resistant to change. It is the opposite ofinnovative,innovating, oradvanced forms, varieties, or features, which have undergone relatively larger or more recent changes. Furthermore, anarchaic form is not only chronologically old (and often conservative) but also rarely used anymore in the modern language, and anobsolete form has fallen out of use altogether. Anarchaic language stage is chronologically old, compared to a more recent language stage, while the termsconservative andinnovative typically compare contemporary forms, varieties or features.
A conservative linguistic form, such as aword orsound feature, is one that remains closer to an older form from which it evolved thancognate forms from the same source.[1]: 87 For example, theSpanish wordcaro/'kaɾo/ and theFrench wordcher/ʃɛʁ/, bothadjectives meaning'dear' or'beloved', similarly evolved from theLatin wordcārum['ka:rum~-ɾũː] (Proto-Romance*/ˈka.ru/). The Spanish word, which is more similar to the common ancestor, is more conservative than its French cognate, which is more innovative.[1]: 87
A language orlanguage variety is said to be conservative if it has fewer new developments or changes than related varieties do. For example,Icelandic is, in some aspects, more similar toOld Norse than other languages that evolved from Old Norse, includingDanish,Norwegian, orSwedish, whileSardinian (especially theNuorese dialects) andItalian are regarded as being the most conservativeRomance languages.[2][3][4][5][6] A 2008 study regarding the stability of modern Icelandic appears to confirm its status as "stable".[7] Therefore, Icelandic[1]: 71 and Sardinian are considered relatively conservative languages. Likewise, somedialects of a language may be more conservative than others.Standard varieties, for example, tend to be more conservative than nonstandard varieties, since education and codification in writing tend to retard change.[8]
Writing is generally said to be more conservative than speech since written forms generally change more slowly than spoken language does. That helps explain inconsistencies in writing systems such asthat of English; since the spoken language has changed relatively more than has the written language, the match between spelling and pronunciation is inconsistent.[9]
A language may be conservative in one respect while simultaneously innovative in another.Bulgarian andMacedonian, closely relatedSlavic languages, are innovative in the grammar of their nouns, having dropped nearly all vestiges of the complex Slaviccase system; at the same time, they are highly conservative in their verbal system, which has been greatly simplified in most other Slavic languages.[10] English, which is one of the more innovativeGermanic languages in most respects (vocabulary, inflection, vowel phonology, syntax), is nevertheless conservative in its consonant phonology, retaining sounds such as (most notably)/θ/ and/ð/ (th), which remain only in the Germanic languages of English, Icelandic and Scots,[11] with/ð/ also remaining in the endangeredElfdalian language. Sardinian, the most conservative Romance language both lexically and phonetically, has a verbal morphology that is somewhat simpler than that of other Romance languages such as Spanish orItalian.
In the 6th century AD,Classical Arabic was a conservative Semitic language compared withClassical Syriac, which was spoken at the same time; Classical Arabic strongly resembles reconstructedProto-Semitic,[12] and Syriac has changed much more. Compared to closely related modernNortheastern Neo-Aramaic, which is not necessarily directly descended from it, Classical Syriac is still a highlyarchaic language form because it is also chronologically old.Georgian has changed remarkably little since the Old Georgian period (the 4th/5th century AD).[citation needed]
In the context of whole language families,Lithuanian[13] andFinnish[14] are the most conservative within modernIndo-European languages andUralic languages respectively.
...if the Romance languages are compared with Latin, it is seen that by most measures Sardinian and Italian are least differentiated...
