Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time.to reconstruct the pre-history of languages  2048 cupcakes  and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics) to develop general theories about how and why language changes. to describe the history of speech communities. to study the history of words, i.e. etymology.Linguists Silvia Luraghi and ‎Vit Bubenik point out, "[The] official act of birth of comparative historical linguistics is conventionally indicated in Sir William Jones' The Sanscrit Language, delivered as a lecture at the Asiatic Society in 1786, in which the author remarked that the similarities between Greek, Latin,