Conservative

In linguistics, a conservative form is one that has undergone little change. For example, it is said that writing is a more conservative form than speech. With words, a word is conservative if it is closer to the older form from which it derived in comparison to cognate forms from the same original word. For example, the Spanish word caro and the French cher evolved from the Latin word cārum. Since the Spanish word is more similar to the common source, it is more conservative than its French counterpart.