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In linguistics, language classification is the grouping of related languages into the same category. There are two main kinds of language classification: genealogical and typological classification. There are two main kinds of language classification: genealogical and typological classification.
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
Theory of language is a topic in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. [1] It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; [2] [3] "Why do languages have the properties they do?"; [4] or "What is the origin of language?". In addition to these fundamental questions, the theory of language also seeks to understand ...
Hockett's Design Features are a set of features that characterize human language and set it apart from animal communication. They were defined by linguist Charles F. Hockett in the 1960s. He called these characteristics the design features of language.
Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable. [119]
For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan and Spanish. Likewise, Proto-Norse , the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages , is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, in the Elder Futhark .
Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or of languages in general, over time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics : historical linguistics , sociolinguistics , and evolutionary linguistics .
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. [1] It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM in 2005, and was released as the second edition on the Internet in April 2008.