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  2. Language change - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change

    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. For instance, modern English is the result of centuries of language change applying to Old English , even though modern English is extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary ...

  3. Historical linguistics - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics

    This perspective explores how languages adapt and change over time in response to cultural, societal, and environmental factors. Language evolution within the framework of historical linguistics is akin to Lamarckism in the sense that linguistic traits acquired during an individual's lifetime can potentially influence subsequent generations of ...

  4. Language death - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death

    Linguists distinguish between language "death" and the process where a language becomes a "dead language" through normal language change, a linguistic phenomenon analogous to pseudoextinction. This happens when a language in the course of its normal development gradually morphs into something that is then recognized as a separate, different ...

  5. Semantic change - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

    A recent survey lists practical tools and online systems for investigating semantic change of words over time. [12] WordEvolutionStudy is an academic platform that takes arbitrary words as input to generate summary views of their evolution based on Google Books ngram dataset and the Corpus of Historical American English.

  6. Drift (linguistics) - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_(linguistics)

    Cyclic drift is the mechanism of long-term evolution that changes the functional characteristics of a language over time, such as the reversible drifts from SOV word order to SVO and from synthetic inflection to analytic observable as typological parameters in the syntax of language families and of areal groupings of languages open to investigation over long periods of time.

  7. Evolution of languages - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_languages

    The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...

  8. Language shift - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_shift

    The study found that language shift is mainly occurring among Javanese people and in districts where Javanese is the dominant language, which is not what was expected. [13] Another study suggests Javanese youths do not value Javanese language and culture as much as the national Indonesian language and culture because they perceive them as ...

  9. Changes to Old English vocabulary - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_to_Old_English...

    It is also found in the rare German loanwords gemütlich and gemütlichkeit. Compare with German ge-, Dutch ge-. gerÄ«m: 'number'. (See worn.) getæl: 'number'. A combination of the prefix ge-and tæl. Besides the phrase "to tell time", [4] it mainly survived in English with meanings related to speech ('tell', 'tale'). Meanings related to ...