Using the Northern Samoyedic languages, Uralic languages spoken by nomads of Northern Siberia, we propose a new method to reconstruct histories of related languages in contact. The method consists of ...

It is widely accepted that Middle Chinese Division II, a syllable category in Middle Chinese, originates from the Old Chinese medial *-r-, yet its reconstruction remains debated. Existing proposals as...

Assimilatory processes are generally understood to rely on sequential structure: a target element adopts features of a preceding or following element. While signed languages arguably show less sequent...

2026 LingComm Grantees The 2026 LingComm Grants awarded seven $300 (USD) grants, thanks to Lingthusiasm patrons, as well as Lukas Graf, Sarah Kelen, Daniel Currie Hall, enchantedsleeper, Rob Monarc…

Text Analysis for aLL. Contribute to massimoaria/tall development by creating an account on GitHub.

By the late Middle Ages, a part of South Slavic, including Macedonian and Bulgarian, had lost nominal case inflection, leading to the disappearance of the old Slavic differential object marking (DOM) ...

The study of language change in American Sign Language (ASL) has been constrained by a limited historical record. Here we present five case studies that demonstrate how applying a broad set of histori...

We examine tonal and non-tonal features involved in the diachronic emergence of a future tense category in Emai, an Edoid language of southern Nigeria. The extant tense system in Emai incorporates val...

Issue of Diachronica

This paper deals with the historical development of the syllable-onset clusters /kl gl pl bl fl/ in Romance languages and dialects and with their articulatory and/or perceptual motivations. Several di...

The complex tone inventories of Kra-Dai languages derive in part from earlier segmental codas via transphonologization. Comparative Austro-Tai research has identified systematic correspondences betwee...

Abstract This paper illustrates that in-depth descriptive work of closely related varieties of Dinka, a Nilotic tone language with an unusually complex suprasegmental system, provides solutions to pre...

William (Bill) Labov, pioneering scholar of language change, died on December 17, 2024. His MA and PhD theses in the mid 1960s revolutionized the field of language variation and change, and he spent t...

The development of the English auxiliary do is a well-studied phenomenon, but there is no agreement on its source (see Denison 1993: Chapter 10). It has been suggested in the literature that a mono-ca...

This paper describes and analyses a historical alternation in what contemporary Mapudungun has developed as a set of transitive roots ending in [Cɨm], where C can represent a labial stop, a retroflex ...

This paper describes and analyses a historical alternation in what contemporary Mapudungun has developed as a set of transitive roots ending in [Cɨm], where C can represent a labial stop, a retroflex ...

Abstract William (Bill) Labov, pioneering scholar of language change, died on December 17, 2024. His MA and PhD theses in the mid 1960s revolutionized the field of language variation and change, and h...

Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Published in 3 issues per year both online and in print, Language & History is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that aims to promote the study of the history of all branches of linguistic…

Nature Biotechnology - An open letter to graduate students and other procrastinators: it’s time to write

Please fill this out if you're interested in reviewing for Diachronica. We're unlikely to give you more than 1 paper per year. We ask for reviews to be returned in a month if you accept (declining ini...