Historical and Comparative Linguistics

Scholars whose primary contribution is reconstructing or classifying language families and tracing sound and grammar change over time, the discipline's founding branch. Belongs here: William Jones, Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, Karl Verner, August Schleicher and Antoine Meillet, the founders of the comparative method and Indo-European studies; Wilhelm Grimm for his historical lexicography; Otto Jespersen for his theory of language change; Joseph Greenberg for large-scale genetic classification; and William Labov, this atlas's sociolinguist, placed here because his foundational studies observe sound change in progress, a historical-linguistics question studied by a newer method rather than a separate field. Does not belong here: a linguist whose main legacy is a general theory of language structure rather than family classification or change, grouped under Structural and Theoretical Linguistics instead.