Language changes
The language continously changes, and we now use a lot of words that
did not exist, or had a different meaning, just a few decades ago. For
instance, we often say cool to mean
excellent or exciting, and we use the word computer
to refer to a digital device rather than a human expert at
calculation. Young people of every generation develop their own slang,
nearly incomprehensible to their parents; for instance, you may find a
lot of modern slang words in the Urban Dictionary, which is
sorta cool. As the language evolves over time, it may become a
different language. In fact, it may even split in two or more
languages, which gradually divert from each other. For instance, both
French and Spanish came from Latin, which is a
now-dead language, once spoken in the Ancient Rome.
The study of the history of languages, including their appearance,
changes over time, and sometimes disappearance, is a major area of
linguistics, called historical
or diachronic linguistics. Researchers are trying to
understand why and how people make up new words (called neologisms), stop
using some of the once-common words (called archaisms), and
change ways of expressing their thoughts. Linguists also study
relations among languages, and divide them into language
families by their historical origins.