Related Fields
There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages, which are not, however, part of comparative linguistics:
- Linguistic typology compares languages to classify them by their features. Its ultimate aim is to understand the universals that govern language, and the range of types found in the world's languages is respect of any particular feature (word order or vowel system, for example). Typological similarity does not imply a historical relationship. However, typological arguments can be used in comparative linguistics: one reconstruction may be preferred to another as typologically more plausible.
- Contact linguistics examines the linguistic results of contact between the speakers of different languages, particularly as evidenced in loan words. An empirical study of loans is by definition historical in focus and therefore forms part of the subject matter of historical linguistics. One of the goals of etymology is to establish which items in a language's vocabulary result from linguistic contact. This is also an important issue both for the comparative method and for the lexical comparison methods, since failure to recognize a loan may distort the findings.
- Contrastive linguistics compares languages usually with the aim of assisting language learning by identifying important differences between the learner's native and target languages. Contrastive linguistics deals solely with present-day languages.
Read more about this topic: Comparative Linguistics
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