Language Variation and Change
Languages vary across regions and social groups, and this MIT OpenCourseWare course treats that variation as evidence of ongoing language change. The course examines how change is the source of variation, and how patterns of variation help linguists reconstruct how change happens, with most case studies drawn from phonetics and phonology in English. Materials include lecture notes, readings, and problem sets covering sound change, dialect variation, and the relationship between synchronic variation and diachronic change. The course draws on sociolinguistic and historical linguistic methods to show how studying a language's present-day variation can reveal its history in motion. As with other MIT OCW offerings, all course materials are free to access online under a Creative Commons license, with no certificate offered.