Serbian historical linguistics at the beginning of the 21st century

The article provides an overview of the key theoretical, methodological and thematic approaches applied in Serbian historical language studies at the beginning of the 21st century. This is a time in which alongside the philological and (or) structural linguistic research orientation, there are also explanatory studies conducted within the framework of cognitive linguistics and linguistic typology. While philological and structural linguistic descriptions may ask what happened in a language, explanatory (cognitive and typological) studies seek to ask why and how something happened. Explanatory historical linguistic studies, therefore, set out to explain the causes and mechanisms of language changes.