Frequency and changes in the contemporary orthophonic standard (in light of the discussion about Witold Mańczak’s irregular phonetic development caused by frequency)

The paper attempts to answer the question whether, in the case of rapid changes such as we currently observe in Polish, a linguist is able to determine if these changes are systemic, i. e. permanent, or remain at the stage of innovation, i. e. are temporary - and hence, whether he or she can declare a change in the linguistic standard and set to looking for its cause. The focus of the article is on the law of speech economy, redundancy, and frequency which is the most important factor correlated with change, as without it the optimal conditions for a phonetic process would not occur