Evidence of language change

This study deals with the historical changes that languages are known to undergo. It thus focuses on an aspect of language which does not seem to constitute one of its most spectacular properties. On the one hand, the historical changeability of languages does not form part of our everyday experience, and on the other, it might strike one as a rather trivial phenomenon, particularly if one shares the common view that everything there is in this world will naturally be subject to change. Yet, it is possible that languages change in language specific ways, that is to say in ways in which they can only change because they are languages. If this is so, the study of linguistic change may help to reveal clearly aspects of the nature of language, and it may pay to investigate language as an historically changing entity.

Of course, it deserves to be stressed right at the outset that the very claim that languages actually ‘change’ is not really self evident. ‘Language change’ is no ‘fact’, but a theoretical construct because processes of ‘language change’ are not observable as such. That language change is nevertheless treated as if it were a ‘fact’ reflects, basically, a complex but plausible interpretation of observable variation among linguistic texts from different historical periods.