"Language change is variation over time in a language's features."
The mechanisms through which languages change over time, including sound change, grammaticalization, and lexicalization.
Historical Linguistics: The study of language change through time, including the mechanisms and patterns of change, historically related languages, and changes in sound, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.
Sociolinguistics: The study of language variation and change in social contexts, including factors like age, gender, ethnicity, social class, geographical location, and language use in different contexts and situations.
Language Contact: The study of how languages interact when speakers of different languages come into contact, including the effects of borrowing, loanwords, language shift, language death, and pidgin and creole languages.
Language Evolution: The study of how languages change over long periods of time, including the origins and development of languages, the genetic relationships between languages, and the emergence of new languages.
Language Acquisition: The study of how children learn language, including the cognitive, social, and linguistic factors that influence this process, as well as how language acquisition can affect language change.
Cognitive Linguistics: The study of how language reflects and shapes our thought processes, including how we categorize and conceptualize the world around us, and how language change reflects changes in our cognitive abilities and cultural worldviews.
Discourse Analysis: The study of how language is used in social contexts, including the analysis of speech acts, discourse markers, narrative structures, and the ways in which language can be used to construct and reinforce social identities and power relations.
Language Variation: The study of how language varies among individuals and groups, including regional dialects, sociolects, and individual differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
Language Standardization: The study of how languages become standardized and how linguistic norms and standards are established and enforced, including the role of language academies, dictionaries, manuals, and other prescriptive sources.
Language Policy: The study of how language policies are formulated and implemented by governments, institutions, and communities, including the effects of language policies on language maintenance, revitalization, and shift, and on social and political tensions in multilingual societies.
Phonological Change: The alteration of sounds and sound patterns that make up a language over time. This may involve the replacement of one sound by another, the loss or addition of sounds, or changes in the way certain sounds are pronounced.
Lexical Change: The evolution of vocabulary in a language over time, which involves new words being created and old ones falling out of use. This can be due to various factors such as technology, culture, migration or borrowing from other languages.
Morphological Change: The adjustment or modification of the internal structure of words in a language: This includes the way in which inflectional markers are applied, prefixes and suffixes are used or dropped, verb forms change, etc.
Syntactic Change: The transformation of patterns of word order and sentence structure in a language. As the speakers of a language evolve over time, the way words and components are arranged in a sentence may change along with it.
Semantic Change: The modification of the meaning of individual words or phrases over time, including shifts in the connotation or denotation of words. This can happen through the influence of other languages, evolving social or cultural contexts, and usage by influential speakers of the language.
Pragmatic Change: The evolution of language as it is used in specific social contexts, which can be influenced by external factors like relationships, status, or power dynamics. This may include the way in which language is used to signal formality or informality, distinctions between dialects or accents, or the development of new registers or slang.
Orthographic Change: The modification of written forms of a language, including the alphabet or other symbols used to represent the language. This can include the addition or removal of letters, changes in spelling, or changes in abbreviation standards.
Contact-Induced Change: The adjustment of a language due to contact with another language, including language borrowing, code-switching, or changes in pronunciation due to exposure to other accents. This can occur through a variety of processes including colonization, linguistic imperialism, acculturation, or migration.
"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.