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LIN 555 - Historical and Comparative Linguistics

3 Credits

Offered every fall

This course introduces students to language change. It considers how and why languages change and the role of language contact. It also presents different theories and methodologies useful for historical and comparative linguistic investigation. Students will investigate a number of related existing languages from language families around the world and seek to reconstruct substantial elements of earlier proto-language stages in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon and historical dialectology.