The era of Big Data offers historical linguistics new roles, new possibilities, and urgent priorities. This course uses these new developments to draw up a linguistic prehistory and early history of the western Eurasian steppe and its periphery, in particular situating Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, indigenous Caucasian languages, and their ancestor(s) in space, time, and areal-typological context.

The study of linguistic variation in American English (and other languages spoken in the United States) is changing dramatically today. This course will introduce patterns of variation and change in American English, covering sound patterns (vowels and consonants), word forms and sentence structures in their social, historical and regional contexts. We will situate these patterns in current linguistic theory, not only sociolinguistics and language change but also more broadly.

This course introduces concepts in corpus development that help the data to be reused by the creator or by others and to be archived and adapted for larger, comparative studies which may range over geographical space or time to permit the analysis of linguistic change in real time. The course will address the importance of robust collection, the coding and storage of specific demographic, situational and attitudinal metadata and reusable annotation as well as practical issues such as preparing for Institutional Review Board oversight to permit data sharing among linguists.

Children are extremely gifted in acquiring their native languages, but languages nevertheless change over time. Why does this paradox exist? In this course, we address this question by studying pidgin and creole languages. More precisely, we examine how, in a situation of contact, syntactic and semantic features of different language types or varieties may recombine into a new emergent linguistic system.