This course introduces students to language change. It considers how and why languages change and the role of language contact. It also presents different theories and methodologies useful for historical and comparative linguistic investigation. Through a series of guided assignments, students will investigate a number of related existing languages from a non-Indo-European language family and reconstruct significant elements of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of the proto-language. Students will learn the techniques of reconstruction, data collection, and data analysis in this course.