"Language change is variation over time in a language's features."
The study of how languages evolve and change over time.
Historical Linguistics: The study of how languages change over time through comparison of different stages of a particular language or related languages.
Sound Change: The study of how the sounds of a language change over time, including shifts in pronunciation, phoneme mergers or splits, and sound shifts.
Grammar Change: The study of how the grammatical rules of a language change over time, including changes in word order, morphology, and syntax.
Semantic Change: The study of how the meaning of words and phrases change over time, including shifts in connotation, denotation, and metaphorical extension.
Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis: The study of how language is used in context, including conventions of social interaction, politeness, and speech acts.
Language Contact: The study of how languages influence each other, through borrowing of vocabulary, convergence of grammatical structures, or creolization.
Dialectology: The study of regional variation within a language or language family, including related concepts such as accent, slang, and register.
Language Variation and Change: The study of why and how different social groups use language differently, including variation based on age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and geographic region.
Language Death and Revitalization: The study of how languages can perish or be brought back from the brink of extinction, including efforts to promote bilingualism and language preservation.
Sociolinguistic Theory: The study of the relationship between language and society, including theoretical frameworks like variationist sociolinguistics, social network analysis, and performative approaches to language change.
Phonological Change: The alteration in sounds of speech over time.
Morphological Change: The changes in the form of words, including the addition or subtraction of morphemes.
Syntactic Change: The change in the order and structure of words in a sentence.
Semantic Change: The change in the meaning of words or phrases over time.
Lexical Change: The introduction of new words in a language, or the changes in the meaning of already existing words.
Pragmatic Change: The modifications in the use of language in different contexts, social settings, and functions.
Discourse Change: The alterations in the way people use language to communicate and convey meaning in various settings.
Stylistic Change: The modifications in the style of language used in a particular genre or literary form over time.
Attitudinal Change: The changes in people's attitudes towards languages and their use over time that can lead to language shift and death.
Orthographic Change: The alteration in the spelling and writing system of a language, including the addition or removal of characters in its script.
Sociolinguistic Change: The change in language use and norms across different social groups and settings.
Contact-Induced Change: The modification in the language due to contact with other languages or dialects.
Diglossic Change: The alteration in the use of two or more language varieties in distinct sociolinguistic situations.
Pidginization and Creolization: The development of a new language variety from contact between two or more languages or dialects.
Prescriptive Change: The imposition of grammatical or linguistic rules and norms to promote standardization and control language change.
"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.