Historical linguistics in 2008: The state of the art

Abstract

An overview of the current state of the field of historical linguistics is offered here, with an eye to identifying enduring questions and tested methodologies but also new opportunities and new methods. Historical linguistics can be characterized as both the study of language change and the study of language history. These are two distinct but related enterprises: we learn about language change by studying particular events in the history of individual languages but the history of these languages also includes more than just the study of change; there are also elements to be recognized that have stayed relatively stable and unchanged over time. Moreover, historical linguistics is interested in determining and exploring relationships that languages show with other languages, whether genetic or diffusionary in nature; the former sort of relationship can provide indirect evidence of change, if related languages, sprung from the same source, nonetheless show, as they typically do, some differences between one another, whereas the latter type of relationship allows for the determination of instances of language change through language contact. Thus there is a vast amount of material that provides grist for the historical linguistic mill; in a real sense, every language has a history and thus is of potential interest to the historical linguist, if even just at the level of description, with the recording of the details of a given language's historical development. Within the history of linguistics, there have been times when the venerable field of historical linguistics was linguistics, period, with little else of concern except the historical. During such times, it was almost impossible to engage in linguistics without being well-versed in historical methodology and without caring about the historical dimension to any description or account. So too, however, there have been times when historical linguistics has been virtually absent from the main stream of linguistic thought and practice, especially in the United States. The former period can be identified with the 19 th century and into the early to