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Category
Historical linguistics
Summary
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics)
to develop general theories about how and why language changes
to describe the history of speech communities
to study the history of words, i.e. etymology
Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as: Unless we can demonstrate significant changes in the conditions of language acquisition and use between some time in the unobservable past and the present, we must assume that the same types and distributions of structures, variation, changes, etc. existed at that time in the past as in the present.
Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity.
At first, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a tool for linguistic reconstruction. Scholars were concerned chiefly with establishing language families and reconstructing unrecorded proto-languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was initially on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories; scholars also studied the Uralic languages, another Eurasian language-family for which less early written material exists. Since then, there has been significant comparative linguistic work expanding outside of European languages as well, such as on the Austronesian languages and on various families of Native American languages, among many others. Comparative linguistics became only a part of a more broadly-conceived discipline of historical linguistics.
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