Question

Marcus is studying developments in chinese dialects over time, and how those dialects have evolved as migration has increased over the last two centuries. what kind of anthropological lens is marcus using?

Answer 1

The answer is "historic linguistics".

Historical linguistics is the study of not just the historical backdrop of dialects, as the name suggests, yet additionally the investigation of how dialects change, and how dialects are identified with each other. It may appear at first this would be a somewhat dull, uneventful field of study, yet that is a long way from reality.

The principle job of historical linguists is to figure out how dialects are connected. By and large, dialects can be appeared to be connected by having a substantial number of words in like manner that were not acquired (cognates). Languages regularly obtain words from each other, however these are typically not very hard to differentiate from different words.