= Language change
<Language change> is systematic change over time in a community's sounds, grammatical patterns or meanings. It can be investigated by comparing historical records or repeated measurements, while separating change from differences in sampling, spelling and individual style. A <text corpus> supplies observations rather than a complete record of every speaker.
A 2007 study by <Erez Lieberman> and collaborators tracked 177 verbs irregular in Old English. In their dataset, 145 remained irregular at the Middle English stage and 98 at the modern endpoint. Their <statistical model> related the rate of <verb regularization> to usage frequency, with estimated half-life proportional to the square root of frequency.<Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language by Erez Lieberman and others>[Abstract; Methods Summary; Fig. 1 and Table 1]{ref}
Under that fitted scaling, a 100-fold frequency increase predicts a tenfold half-life increase. This is an empirical relationship for the studied process and data, rather than a universal law for every kind of <language change>. The historical endpoint must not be mistaken for a fresh count of present-day usage.
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