Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is a scientific analyse of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:

Historical linguistics is founded on a Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as:

Unless we cansignificant adjust in the conditions of Linguistic communication acquisition and use between some time in the unobservable past as living as the present, we must assume that the same types as well as distributions of structures, variation, changes, etc. existed at that time in the past as in the present.

Evolutionary context

In terms of evolutionary theory, historical linguistics as opposed to research into the origin of language studies Lamarckian acquired characteristics of languages.