Historical linguistics + socio

• looking at language across time; i.e., language change
• At every level of the grammar  morphological  syntactic  semantic
•  phonetic/phonological (we know the most about this)

Phonological changes can account for dialect differences, as well as changes over time

• To reconstruct what sounds existed in previous forms of a language (or in a “parent” Compile cognate sets, eliminating borrowings (“oddballs”)
•  Determine sound correspondences
•  Reconstruct a sound for each position
•  Reconstruct sound that would have undergone the most natural sound change
•  If there is more than one rule, determine the rule-ordering

• lenition  Latinamica→Portugueseamiga→Spanishamiga→French
• amie
•  assimilation  late Latin octo ‘eight’ → Italian otto
•  other processes include fortition and dissimilation, vowel deletion and vowel epenthesis (insertion)
•  also, metathesis (reversal of segments)  Latinpericulum‘danger’→Spanish peligro

• Sometimes one sound changes, and that triggers another sound to change in order to remain distinct
•  This is called a chain shift  One of the most famous cases of this is the Great Vowel Shift, which affected most of the vowels of English

• Early Middle English Vowel Shortening Rule
• - affected long vowels divine to divinity

• Only the written record
• -difficult to distinguish similarities due to language contact from similarities due to common ancestry
• - chance similarities (false cognates)

• -imperfect language learning
• - social motivations for change
• -language contact
• -natural articulatory/perceptual processes

• variations in today's language (dialects)
• -evidence of language change in progress

• Variation in language - language varies according to region and social factors such as
•  gender
•  age
•  ethnicity
•  socioeconomic status

• (ing)
• used frequently by younger people, change will not become dominant and the other usage is not threatened

• a line on a dialect map separating different areas
• - when several isoglosses coincide it is called an isogloss bundle

• two phonemes become one
• cot-caught
• pin-pen

• Department store study
• Upper, middle and lower class and the post-vocalic r

• languages spoken by bilinguals
• a community of bilinguals vs bilingual communities

words borrowed by bilinguals from one language to another - content words more likely to be borrowed than function words

-respects phrase boundaries and grammars of the languages

• pidgins- a rudimentarylanguage with simple grammatical rules and vocabulary taken from a lexifier language.
• creole - when pidgin becomes the first language of children

•  “usefulness”  can’t use Garifuna in the stores
•  marginal status of the language (outsiders)  not taught in schools/too difficult  other children tease in school
•  lack of self-respect (insiders)  higher status of Belizean Creole
•  as a sign of “Belizean-ness”