comparative linguistics

The comparison of the features of different languages or dialects, or the different historical states of a language. In the 19th-c, the concern was exclusively historical, as linguists explored the similarities and differences between languages, and tried to set up common antecedents on the basis of the correspondences they observed to exist between their sounds. In this way, Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages were all shown to belong to the Indo-European language family. This field of study was known as comparative philology, and the process of deducing the characteristics of the antecedent or parent language as comparative reconstruction.

Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Phonetics

Phonology

Morphology

Syntax

Semantics

Lexical semantics

Statistical semantics

Structural semantics

Prototype semantics

Stylistics

Prescription

Pragmatics

Applied linguistics

Psycholinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Generative linguistics

Cognitive linguistics

Computational linguistics

Descriptive linguistics

Historical linguistics

Comparative linguistics

Etymology

History of linguistics

List of linguists

Unsolved problems

Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness.

Relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative linguistics aims to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages.

The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is the comparative method, which aims to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon.

The earliest method of this type was glottochronology, which proposed a mathematical formula for establishing the date when two languages separated, based on percentage of a core vocabulary of 100 (later 200) items that are cognate in the languages being compared.

There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages, which are not, however, part of comparative linguistics:

Linguistic typology compares languages in order to classify them by their features. Its ultimate aim is to understand the universals that govern language, and the range of types found in the world's language is respect of any particular feature (word order or vowel system, for example). Contrastive linguistics compares languages usually with the aim of assisting language learning by identifying important differences between the learner's native and target languages.