ABSTRACT
Historical linguistics examines the nature of linguistic change, looking at how and why languages change, and what the underlying forces and processes are that shape, mould and direct modifications in language. Engaging in this enterprise, historical linguists also map the world’s languages, reconstruct their earlier states, determine their relationships to one another and, with the use of written documentation, fit extinct languages of the past into the jigsaw puzzle of the world’s complex pattern of linguistic distribution. The historian of language must also identify the various influences that are at work in language change relating to both internal conditions in the linguistic system itself and external forces at play, such as language contact, adherence to social norms and the like. Historical linguistic studies are important for
our understanding of human language in general. Study of language change can reveal or test language universals, with data from differences between stages of languages being analogous to the typologist’s cross-linguistic surveys [see LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY]. Furthermore, the structural, social and biological complexity of language, and its relationships to other forms of communication, can be fully understood only when we know how it responds to internal and external stimuli. Language is always embedded in a social and historical context.
