Robert McColl Millar is Professor of Linguistics and Scottish Language at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He has published widely on, amongst other things, linguistic contact and rapid language change, the sociology of language, and dialectology. His most recent publications include Contact: The Interaction of Closely Related Linguistic Varieties and the History of English (2016) and A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland (2020). He has recently completed A History of the Scots Language, which will be published in 2023.

R L Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex, UK, and a leading authority on Basque language and historical linguistics. His book The History of Basque (1997) is an essential reference on diachronic Basque linguistics, and probably the best-known introduction to Basque linguistics. He also wrote about the problem of the origin of language and, amongst his other publications, the very successful foundational text, Language: The Basics (1995).

List of illustrations

To the reader

To the teacher

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1. The fact of language change

1.1 Irregardless

1.2 English then and now

1.3 Attitudes to language change

1.4 The inevitability of change

Case-study: kind regards

Further reading

Exercises

2. Lexical and semantic change

2.1 Borrowing

2.2 Phonological treatment of loans

2.3 Morphological treatment of loans

2.4 Formation of new words

2.5 Change in word-meaning

Case study: nice

Further reading

Exercises

3. Phonological change 1: Change in pronunciation

3.1 The phonetic basis of phonological change

3.2 Assimilation and dissimilation

3.3 Lenition and fortition

3.4 Addition and removal of phonetic features

3.5 Vowels and syllable structure

3.6 Whole-segment processes

3.7 The regularity issue: a first look

Case study: Germanic */xw/ in the present-day dialects

3.8 Summary

Further reading

Exercises

4. Phonological change II: Change in phonological systems

4.1 Conditioning and rephonologization

4.2 Phonological space

4.3 Chain shifts

Case study: large scale change in the Germanic consonant system - Grimm's Law and Verner's Law

4.4 Summary

Further reading

Exercises

5. Morphological change

5.1 Reanalysis

5.2 Analogy and levelling

5.3 Universal principles of analogy

5.4 Morphologization

5.5 Morphologization of phonological rules

5.6 Change in morphological type

Case study: The evolution of the definite article from the demonstrative paradigm in English

Further reading

Exercises

6. Syntactic change

6.1 Reanalysis of surface structure

6.2 Shift of markedness

6.3 Grammaticalization

6.4 Typological harmony

6.5 Syntactic change as restructuring of grammars

Case study: the rise of ergativity

Further reading

Exercises

7. Relatedness between languages

7.1 The origin of dialects

7.2 Dialect geography

7.4 Tree model and wave model

7.5 The language families of the world

Case study: A Martian's view on the Germanic language family

Further reading

Exercises

8. The comparative method

8.1 Systematic correspondences

8.2 Comparative reconstruction

8.3 Pitfalls and limitations

8.4 The Neogrammarian Hypothesis

8.5 Semantic reconstruction

8.6 The use of typology and universals

8.7 Reconstructing grammar

8.8 The reality of proto-languages

Case study: A reconstruction too far?

Further reading

Exercises

9. Internal Reconstruction

9.1 A first look at the internal method

9.2 Alternations and internal reconstruction

9.3 Internal reconstruction of grammar and lexicon

Case study: The laryngeal theory of PIE

Further reading

Exercises

10. The origin and propagation of change

10.1 The Saussurean paradox

10.2 Variation and social stratification

10.3 Variation as the vehicle of change

10.4 Lexical diffusion

10.5 Near-mergers

Case study: historical sociolinguistics

Further reading

Exercises

11. Social and historical pressures upon language

11.1 Linguistic contact

11.2 Linguistic areas

11.3 Language birth: pidgins and creoles

11.4 Language planning

11.5 Language death

Case study: the genesis and development of American and New Zealand English

Further reading

Exercises

12. Language and pre-history

12.1 Introduction

12.2 Linguistic palaeontology

12.3 Links with archaeology

12.4 Statistical methods

Case study: Greenberg's mass comparison

Further reading

Exercises

Appendix: The Swadesh 200-word list

References

Index