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Historical linguistics (also '''diachronic linguistics''') is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:
HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th Century and grew out of the earlier discipline of Philology , the study of ancient texts and documents, which goes back to antiquity. At first historical linguistics was Comparative Linguistics and mainly concerned with establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric languages, using the Comparative Method and Internal Reconstruction . The focus was on the well-known Indo-European Languages , many of which had long written histories. But since then, significant comparative linguistic work has been done on the Uralic Languages , Austronesian Languages and various families of Native American Languages , among many others. Comparative Linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European Languages comparative study is now a highly specialised field and most research is being carried out on the subsequent development of these languages, particularly the development of the modern standard varieties. EVOLUTION INTO OTHER FIELDS Initially, ''all'' modern linguistics was historical in orientation - even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. But . Also, the work of Sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways which point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress. The biological Origin Of Language is in principle a concern of historical linguistics, but most linguists regard it as too remote to be reliably established by standard techniques of historical linguistics such as the Comparative Method . Less standard techniques, such as Mass Lexical Comparison , are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable. The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are a large number of theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans , each with their own interpretation of the archaeological record. SEE ALSO
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