Historical linguistics focuses on all aspects of language change, including specific changes in individual languages to theoretical questions of language change more generally. We explore explanations and motivations for changes across different linguistic domains. Our research covers a wide range of language and theoretical approaches, from traditional philology, diachronic syntax, and digital humanities.
Historical sociolinguistics explores the relationship between language and society in its historical dimensions. By combining knowledge from different disciplines, historical sociolinguists aim to answer questions about how languages varied in the past, and what this variation can tell us about the future. Researchers in this area are interested in particular forms of dialect contact across a range of languages.
While language variation does not entail language change, language change does entail variation, as famously observed by Labov and Herzog (1968:188). Variation thus provides a synchronic window on diachronic language change, allowing us to examine the ways in which change spreads through the community and through the language. The study of variation and change thus involves examining patterns of language use in a speech community, and how that is impacted by social factors (such as age, gender, social class, ethnicity etc.), as well as linguistic factors, and the interaction between the two.
Contact linguistics involves the study of speakers residing in bilingual, or multilingual communities. In some instances, this contact can lead to language change. Our researchers look at different social contexts, multilingual societies, immigration, colonisation, trade, and the different sociolinguistic processes involved in language contact, such as accommodation, code-switching, koineisation and mixing.
Staff at ANU work with Australian Indigenous speech communities on maintaining languages, looking at language shift and its causes, and on reawakening Indigenous languages using philological methods on archival sources. They also work on understanding the deep history of Australian Indigenous speech communities, using the techniques of comparative linguistics, historical linguistics and phylogenetics.
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