Compiled in honor and celebration of veteran anthropologist Harold C. Fleming, this book contains 23 articles by anthropologists (in the general sense) from the four main disciplines of prehistory: archaeology, biogenetics, paleoanthropology, and genetic (historical) linguistics. Because of Professor Fleming's major focus on language — he founded the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory and the journal Mother Tongue — the content of the book is heavily tilted toward the study of human language, its origins, historical development, and taxonomy. Because of Fleming's extensive field experience in Africa some of the articles deal with African topics. This volume is intended to exemplify the principle, in the words of Fleming himself, that each of the four disciplines is enriched when it combines with any one of the other four. The authors are representative of the cutting edge of their respective fields, and this book is unusual in including contributions from a wide range of anthropological fields rather than concentrating in any one of them.

Taking an anthropological perspective, Alan Barnard explores the evolution of language by investigating the lives and languages of modern hunter-gatherers.

No detailed description available for "The Prehistory of Languages".

Every language includes layers of lexical and grammatical elements that entered it at different times in the more or less distant past. Hence, for periods preceding our earliest historical documentation, linguistic stratigraphy the systematic study of such layers may yield information about the prehistory of a given tradition of speaking in a variety of ways. For instance, irregular phonological reflexes may be evidence of the convergence of diverse dialects in the formation of a language, and layers of material from different source languages may form a record of changing cultural contacts in the past. In this volume are discussed past problems and current advances in the stratigraphy of Indo-European, African, Southeast Asian, Australian, Oceanic, Japanese, and Meso-American languages.

This collection brings together Peter Trudgill's essays on the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics for the first time.

The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a survey of the field covering the methods which underpin current work; models of language change; and the importance of historical linguistics for other subfields of linguistics and other disciplines. Divided into five sections, the volume encompass a wide range of approaches and addresses issues in the following areas: historical perspectives methods and models language change interfaces regional summaries Each of the thirty-two chapters is written by a specialist in the field and provides: a introduction to the subject; an analysis of the relationship between the diachronic and synchronic study of the topic; an overview of the main current and critical trends; and examples from primary data. The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area. Chapter 28 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315794013.ch28