historical linguistics

Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics);to develop general theories about how and why language changes;to describe the history of speech communities;to study the history of words, i.e., etymology.
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Noun
1. the study of linguistic change
(hypernym) linguistics
(part-meronym) sound law
(class) deriving, derivation, etymologizing