The wave model describes language change as a series of waves or diffusion events, in which changes spread out from a central area to neighboring regions.
Phonology: The study of sounds used in language, including how they are produced, perceived, and classified.
Phonetics: The science of describing speech sounds.
Morphology: The study of the internal structure of words and how they are formed.
Syntax: The study of sentence structure and word order in language.
Semantics: The study of meaning in language.
Lexicography: The practice of compiling dictionaries and the study of their structure and function.
Etymology: The study of the history and evolution of words.
Language change: The study of how languages change over time, including sound change, grammatical change, and semantic change.
Language contact: The influence of one language on another, including borrowings and language mixing.
Language families: Groups of languages that share a common ancestor, such as the Romance languages or the Germanic languages.
Comparative linguistics: The comparison of different languages to identify similarities and differences and to reconstruct their histories.
Historical linguistics: The study of language change over time, including its causes and consequences.
Language evolution: The processes by which languages change over time, including genetic factors and cultural influences.
Dialectology: The study of regional variations in language.
Sociolinguistics: The study of the relationship between language and social factors, including social class, gender, and ethnicity.
Language typology: The classification of languages based on their structural features.
Computational linguistics: The study of computational techniques for processing language, including natural language processing and machine translation.
Psycholinguistics: The study of how language is acquired, processed, and represented in the brain.
Neurolinguistics: The study of the neural basis of language processing and production.
Language acquisition: The study of how children learn language, including first and second language acquisition.
The Internal Reconstruction wave model: This model reconstructs a protolanguage by comparing the similarities and differences between languages.
The Comparative wave model: This model compares languages and identifies cognates (words that have a common origin but may have evolved differently in different languages).
The Sound change wave model: This model explains variations in sounds by tracing changes in phonemes or speech sounds over time and across languages.
The Mass Comparison wave model: This model involves comparing large sets of languages to identify patterns of linguistic evolution and contact.
The Family Tree wave model: This model represents the evolution of a language family or group of related languages as a branching tree, with each branch representing a different language.
The Wave Theory wave model: This model hypothesizes that linguistic changes occur in a series of waves, with certain changes spreading rapidly across a population before becoming fixed.
The Grammaticalization wave model: This model describes how words or phrases evolve over time to become more grammatically complex, often losing their original meaning or becoming fixed as grammatical markers.
The Lexical diffusion wave model: This model explains how new words enter a language, spreading from one community to another through various forms of contact.
The Contact Linguistics wave model: This model studies the ways in which languages influence each other in situations of intense language contact, such as colonization, migration, or trade.
The Sociolinguistics wave model: This model studies how linguistic variation and change are shaped by social factors such as class, gender, ethnicity, and geography.