Description: Written by an international team of leading scholars, this groundbreaking reference work explores the nature of language change and diffusion, and paves the way for future research in this rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field.
- Features 35 newly-written essays from internationally acclaimed experts that reflect the growth and vitality of the burgeoning area of historical sociolinguistics
- Examines how sociolinguistic theoretical models, methods, findings, and expertise can be used to reconstruct a language's past in order to explain linguistic changes and developments
- Bridges the gap between the past and the present in linguistic studies
- Structured thematically into sections exploring: origins and theoretical assumptions; methods for the sociolinguistic study of the history of languages; linguistic and extra-linguistic variables; historical dialectology, language contact and diffusion; and attitudes to language
Review Quotes:
"Taken as a whole, The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics offers the reader an incomparable source of state-of-the-art papers in the field, most of which were written exclusively for the present edition. I am sure it will become a required text for those delving into the discipline." (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 1 October 2014)
"In this respect, the Handbook represents both an excellent summary of the state of the art in historical sociolinguistics and a good starting point for further research." (Linguistlist, 1 April 2013)