Millennia of Language Change

Peter Trudgill is a world-renowned theoretical dialectologist, with Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala, East Anglia, La Trobe, British Colombia, and Patras. Recent publications include Dialects Matters: Respecting Vernacular Language (2016) and Investigations in Sociohistorical Linguistics (2010).

• Acknowledgements; Prologue. The long view; 1. Prehistoric sociolinguistics and the uniformitarian hypothesis: what were stone-age languages like?; 2. From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on many millennia of complexification; 3. First-millennium England: a tale of two copulas; 4. The first three-thousand years: contact in prehistoric and early historic English; 5. Verners law, Germanic dialects, and the English dialect 'default singulars'; 6. Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian migrations and the linguistic consequences of isolation; 7. The Hellenistic Koiné 320 BC to 550 AD and its medieval congeners; 8. Indo-European feminines: contact, diffusion and gender loss around the North Sea; Sources; References.