Research subject French Historical Linguistics

In historical linguistics research are being made on phonetic change. French has in fact undergone radical change concerning sounds.

The reasons for this are social, demographic, geographic and/or political. During some periods changes are faster than during others. As a language historian one can study how a language has developed over the time (diachrony) or how it looked during a certain time during the history (synchrony).

In historical linguistics research are being made on phonetic change. French has in fact undergone radical change concerning sounds. That goes for the pronounciation, where the number of syllables was reduced; many words have not kept one single phoneme from the Latin etymon (original word). Other aspects where research can be made are the morphosyntactic ones, e. g. demonstrative and relative pronouns. Personal pronouns, which were not much in use in Latin, and still are not much used in other Romance languages, is another field. Concerning the verbal system, studies have been made on the new future tense and on the indicative and the subjunctive moods. Studies are also made on text binding since there are several discourse markers in Old French. Another field of research is the lexicon: due to its long history, one can examine the Latin vocabulary and the Latin loanwords in French. French has also been influenced by other languages in the area, for instance the German and the Arabic ones.