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Project

The interplay between language contact and language change in a fragmentary linguistic area: the Italic peninsula in the first millennium B.C.E.

This research project focuses on the languages spoken in the Italic peninsula in the first millennium B.C.E. (in particular, Latin, Etruscan, Oscan and Umbrian) and the insights they can provide into the process of language change. Linguists have long recognised that the spread of language innovations from one language variety to another is an integral part of all language change, but the conditions which determine whether or not an innovation spreads to neighbouring varieties are not well understood. In particular, there has been little systematic research on the effects of different degrees of relatedness and similarity between the languages involved on the diffusion of novel features between them. The Italic peninsula is an area that is of unique interest for resolving questions such as this, in that it attests a large number of languages with different degrees of relationship and typological similarity. Studying the effects of language contact in this context will allow the various predictors of language change to be systematically examined in relation to each other. In addition, the results of this research project will provide insights for future research on poorly attested languages

Date:1 Nov 2019 →  1 Sep 2023
Keywords:language contact, language change, diffusion, corpus linguistics, fragmentary languages, ancient languages, dialectology, philology
Disciplines:Contact linguistics, Corpus linguistics, Dialectology, Historical linguistics
Project type:PhD project