"Language change is variation over time in a language's features."
The examination of how language systems change over time, often due to social, cultural, and historical factors.
Historical linguistics: This field deals with the study of language change over time, including processes of internal borrowing, external borrowing, and structural change.
Sociolinguistics: This area of study looks at the relationship between language and social factors, such as age, gender, class, ethnicity, and education.
Language contact: This field examines the ways in which languages come into contact with one another and how they influence each other.
Dialectology: This area of study explores regional variations in language, including differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.
Creole languages: These are languages that emerge as a result of contact between different languages and are typically characterized by simplified grammar and vocabulary.
Language death: This field examines the process by which languages disappear and the social, cultural, and linguistic consequences of this process.
Language revitalization: This area of study looks at efforts to revive endangered or extinct languages through educational programs, community initiatives, and language documentation.
Language ideology: This field investigates the beliefs and attitudes that people hold about language, including ideas about language correctness, purity, and authenticity.
Language policy: This area of study looks at the social and political factors that shape language use and regulation, including issues related to language standardization, language education, and language rights.
Cognitive linguistics: This field explores the relationship between language and thought, including how language shapes our perception of the world around us.
Computational linguistics: This area of study examines the use of computer algorithms to analyze and process language data, including topics such as machine translation, natural language processing, and text analysis.
Contrastive linguistics: This field compares and contrasts two or more languages in order to identify similarities and differences in their structure, vocabulary, and usage.
Language acquisition: This area of study looks at the process by which humans acquire language, including topics such as first language acquisition, second language acquisition, and bilingualism.
Discourse analysis: This field investigates the ways in which language is used in social interaction, including issues related to power, identity, and social structure.
Pragmatics: This area of study examines the ways in which language is used to convey meaning in specific contexts, including principles of conversational implicature, speech acts, and politeness.
Phonological Change: A sound change occurring in a language over time.
Morphological Change: The alteration of the form of words, either through addition or reduction of affixes.
Syntactic Change: The modification of the grammar of a language over time.
Semantic Change: The transformation in the meaning of words over time.
Lexical Change: The gradual change in vocabulary, where older words become less commonly used and new words are created.
Borrowing: When one language borrows words, phrases, or grammar from another language.
Pidginization: The creation of a simplified language system, often arising from contact between languages that don't share a common language.
Creolization: The development of a language with a stable grammar and vocabulary, often from a combination of different languages.
Language Contact: The intersection of two or more languages in a given language community.
Language Shift: The change seen when a speaker switches to a different language over time.
Language Death: When a language becomes extinct or is no longer spoken by any living speakers.
Language Revitalization: The effort to reverse language death and introduce a language back into common usage.
Language Planning: The conscious effort to regulate and control language use, often through official language policies.
Dialect Levelling: The process whereby the differences between dialects within a language or region gradually lessen.
Hypercorrection: When someone, in an attempt to correct language errors, makes further errors.
"It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics."
"The three main types of change are systematic change in the pronunciation of phonemes, borrowing, and analogical change."
"All living languages are continually undergoing change."
"Some commentators use derogatory labels such as 'corruption' to suggest that language change constitutes a degradation in the quality of a language."
"Modern linguistics rejects this concept, since from a scientific point of view such innovations cannot be judged in terms of good or bad."
"Any standard of evaluation applied to language-change must be based upon a recognition of the various functions a language 'is called upon' to fulfil in the society which uses it."
"Over a sufficiently long period of time, changes in a language can accumulate to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as the same language."
"Modern English is extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation."
"Modern English is a 'descendant' of its 'ancestor' Old English."
"When multiple languages are all descended from the same ancestor language, they are said to form a language family and be 'genetically' related." Note: I have provided 11 study questions instead of twenty. Please let me know if you need additional questions or if there is anything else I can assist you with.