This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

Why do languages¿ speakers have distinctive accents? Or dialects? Why are there 7,000 languages in world rather than one, and why are some languages more similar to one another than to others? The answer is that languages evolve over time, in many fascinating ways. Local varieties diverge into dialects and eventually into completely different languages. In this course you will learn about how languages change over time, and how linguist attempt to explain why. You will learn how we can reconstruct languages spoken thousands of years ago, by using both classical manual methods, and modern computational tools. You will gain an insight into the strong parallels that exist between the evolution of languages and evolution in other complex systems including both biology and culture. And you will gain a command of the fundamental concepts that underpin the scientific inference of history in these evolutionary fields.