The Comparative Method is not enough: Innovating historical linguistic methodology 

What if historical linguistics had been conceived of not in Germany, but in Chile or Tanzania? The linguistic, socio-historical, and geo-political realities of 19th-century Europe have doubtlessly shaped the assumptions and approach of the Comparative Method as developed by researchers from Bopp to Schleicher. Although consistently employed in essentially this form ever since, already at the end of the 19th century, elements of the method and some of its presuppositions were called into question by Schuchardt (1885) and others. Since then, with the broadening of linguistic horizons beyond ‘classical’ languages, it has become evident that other extra- or paralinguistic factors also have a significant impact on language change, be they variationist (Chambers & Trudgill 1998), relating to contact (Weinreich 1953; Fishman et al. 1971; Thomason 2008; Sinnemäki fthc.), or constraining from a typological perspective (Greenberg 1966; Walkden et al. 2023). Even more fundamentally, the traditional comparative method only considers phonological change and does not concern itself with the lexicon, morphology, or syntax.

While still a useful tool in many cases and from a macroscopic perspective, it is nevertheless clear that the Comparative Method alone is no longer enough to answer the questions that have emerged recently from these new insights. Rather, the Comparative Method needs to be integrated with a wider, holistic approach that moves away from assuming rigid and ideal regularity, exceptionlessness and universality. This approach more centrally takes into account multilingual dynamics, in particular of language ecologies outside of Europe and the Global North (Meyer 2023; Marten fthc.). In this way, our conceptualisation of language change is reoriented from a deterministic to a more probabilistic model that can work with and account for multiple dimensions – contact, sociolinguistics, typology, and uncertainty.

Since the recent addition of genetic and archaeological data and methods to the consideration of language change (Heggarty et al. 2023), it is imperative and timely to also re-evaluate the soundness of the basic linguistic methods that are used. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers at any career stage interested in the methodological and epistemological questions entailed by going beyond the Comparative Method to a more current, holistic understanding of and approach to language change – a New Comparative Method. 

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