Chapter 8 reveals that languages change over time, with new variants developing and others going obsolete. This chapter aims, firstly, at giving the reader insights into the phenomenon of language change, which has resulted in a wide variety of languages spread throughout our planet that can be grouped into language many families that will be surveyed. We will ask why languages change and provide examples of changes that affect different parts of the grammar, with special attention to grammaticalization. We stress that languages are not getting better or worse as a result of these changes. While we see that under the right circumstances a language can “split” and develop into two or more different languages, attention is also paid to the fact that languages can go extinct. With that general background, we can ask whether the study of language change has resulted in an argument that could support the Innateness Hypothesis for language. To this end, we will ask whether there are certain properties of languages that are immune to change and if so, whether this can be explained if we assume that these properties are anchored in the innate system?

China is one of the most multilingual countries in the world. The government of the People’s Republic of China promotes the country as a harmonious and unified nation with 56 distinct ethnic groups who speak more than 400 heritage languages. The government has not only legally recognized multilingualism but also publicly encouraged a climate where the teaching and learning of a variety of heritage languages can flourish. This chapter provides insights into our understanding of Chinese language policy and implementation and heritage language maintenance and is based on empirical research and case studies in China’s multilingual regions and provinces. It examines the application of the Chinese government’s language policy and heritage language practices over the last 30 years with its underlying language ideology and practices, revealing de facto language policies. While modern standard Chinese (Putonghua) continues to be a powerful factor in both consolidating and probing educational, cultural, social, and political discourse as well as the spatial environment, Xi Jinping’s recent “One Belt and One Road” project has created a new linguistic environment, which has affected the use of heritage languages within diverse minority groups. This has accelerated the deep concern shared among those advocating heritage language maintenance in China.

Chapter 7 first considers some general issues regarding the classification of languages, such as the contrast between language and dialect. The chapter then explores how languages can be grouped into families based on their historical relationships and what types of evidence are needed to prove such family relationships among languages. It looks at how ancestral languages such as Proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed on the basis of their present-day descendants. In subsequent sections, typological classifications are discussed. Since languages vary in many different ways on several levels—by the sounds they employ, word-structure patterns, word orders, and the ways certain meanings are expressed—numerous typological classifications can be devised. Throughout the chapter, three such classifications are examined, one based on morphological structures, another based on the syntactic factors such as word order, and one based on semantic properties of the languages being classified. Readers will explore how language classifications can change over time and how the two types of classifications—familial and typological—correspond.

This chapter covers several issues in language classification: the distinction between a language, a dialect, and an accent; how and why languages are classified into families; how the ancestral language of a given family can be reconstructed; how languages diversify and how related languages come about. A separate section is dedicated to the documentation of languages “in the field.” The final section is concerned with the issue of language mapping; various resources offering language maps are discussed.