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Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation (e.g., more than one way of pronouncing the same phoneme or the same word), lexicon (e.g., multiple words with the same meaning), grammar (e.g., different syntactic constructions expressing the same grammatical function), and ...
Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or of languages in general, across a period of time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics : historical linguistics , sociolinguistics , and evolutionary linguistics .
By some classifications, nearly 7000 languages exist worldwide, with a great amount of variation thought to have evolved through cultural differentiation. There are four factors that are thought to be the reason as to why language variation exists between cultures: founder effects, drift, hybridization and adaptation. With the vast amounts of ...
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. [1] It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages.
Language convergence is a type of linguistic change in which languages come to resemble one another structurally as a result of prolonged language contact and mutual interference, regardless of whether those languages belong to the same language family, i.e. stem from a common genealogical proto-language. [1]
Then, in mixed-language marriages, children would speak the "higher-status" language, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today. Assimilation is the process whereby a speech-community becomes bilingual and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language.
Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige (where a non-standard dialect is highly valued).
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.