Category:Historical linguistics

Broadly Historical linguistics covers the elements of the historical linguistics, language variation and change, and language histories, including the specific fields of study

Linguistic prehistory
 * Indo-European linguistic prehistory
 * Methods of linguistic prehistory
 * Linguistic prehistory limitations

Linguistic change
 * Early theories
 * Internal and external causes
 * Interaction of causal factors

Sound change
 * Non-phonemic (Allophonemic) changes
 * Phonemic changes
 * General sound changes
 * Common sound changes
 * Relative chronology
 * Chain shifts

Borrowing
 * Cultural inferences

Analogical changes
 * Proportional Analogy
 * Analogical levelling
 * Analogical extension
 * Analogy and sound change
 * Analogical models
 * Other analogies

Comparative method
 * Regularity of sound change
 * Basic assumptions

Linguistic reconstruction
 * Proto-languages

Linguistic classification
 * Language families
 * Sub-grouping
 * Terminology
 * Glottochronology (Lexicostatistics)

Models of linguistic change
 * Family-tree model
 * Dialectology (Linguistic geography)
 * Wave theory
 * Sociolinguistics
 * Lexical diffusion

Internal reconstruction
 * Relative chronology

Syntactic change
 * Mechanisms of syntactic change
 * Reanalysis and extension
 * Generative approaches
 * Grammaticalisation
 * Syntactic reconstruction

Semantic change

Lexical change

Areal linguistics
 * Linguistic areas

Distant genetic relationships
 * Lexical comparison
 * Sound correspondences
 * Grammatical evidence
 * Borrowing
 * Semantic constraints
 * Onomatopoeia
 * Nursery forms
 * Short forms and unmatched segments
 * Chance similarities
 * Sound-meaning isomorphism
 * Only linguistic evidence
 * Erroneous morphological analysis
 * Non-cognates
 * Spurious forms

Philology
 * Role of writing