Neogrammarian hypothesis

The claim that sound changes operate regularly wherever their phonetic conditions are met, rather than affecting words unpredictably. Exceptions require explanation, often through analogy or later change.

Sound change: A historical alteration in the pronunciation of a language’s sounds. The hypothesis describes sound change as systematic rather than word-by-word.
Junggrammatiker: The German Neogrammarians, a late nineteenth-century group of linguists associated with regular sound change. Their school gave the hypothesis its name and argued for its strongest formulation.
Young Grammarians: An English name for the late nineteenth-century Neogrammarians, who emphasized regular sound change. This label identifies the advocates whose hypothesis is under discussion.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change and how their histories can be reconstructed. The hypothesis established a methodological standard for explaining historical sound correspondences.
Actuation problem: The question of why a particular linguistic change begins at a particular time and place. Regularity describes how changes proceed but does not by itself explain their onset.
Phonetic conditioning: The influence of a sound’s phonetic environment on how it is produced or changes over time. Regular changes often affect sounds only in specified phonetic environments.
August Leskien: A German linguist who helped formulate the Neogrammarian position on sound change. His formulation made phonetic conditioning central to the claim of regularity.
Dialect geography: The study of how linguistic features vary across geographic regions. Geographic patterns can reveal gradual and socially uneven spread rather than uniform change.
Proto-Indo-European: The reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Regular correspondences made systematic reconstruction of this unattested language possible.
Phonologization: The development of a phonetic difference into a contrast represented in a language’s sound system. It examines how gradual phonetic changes become categorical sound-system changes.

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