Millennia of Language Change : Sociolinguistic Studies in Deep Historical Linguistics

This latest collection of Peter Trudgill's most seminal articles brings together his writing on the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics for the first time. Aimed at academics and students, the book will arouse interest and provoke discussion through its wide-ranging linguistic-geographical coverage and its broad historical focus.

Were Stone-Age languages really more complex than their modern counterparts? Was Basque actually once spoken over all of Western Europe? Were Welsh-speaking slaves truly responsible for the loss of English morphology? This latest collection of Peter Trudgill''s most seminal articles explores these questions and more. Focused around the theme of sociolinguistics and language change across deep historical millennia (the Palaeolithic era to the Early Middle Ages), the essays explore topics in historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, language change, linguistic typology, geolinguistics, and language contact phenomena. Each paper is fully updated for this volume, and includes linking commentaries and summaries, for easy cross-reference. This collection will be indispensable to academic specialists and graduate students with an interest in the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics.