Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Introduction -- The discovery of Indo-European -- Writing: its history and its decipherment -- Sound change -- Analogy and change in word structure -- Syntactic change -- Semantic change -- Lexical borrowing -- Lexical change and etymology: the study of words -- Language, dialect, and standard -- Dialect geography and dialectology -- Language spread, link languages, and bilingualism -- Convergence: dialectology beyond language boundaries -- Pidgins, creoles, and related forms of language -- Language death -- Comparative method: establishing language relationship -- Proto-world?: the question of long-distance genetic relationships -- Historical linguistics, history, and prehistory: linguistic paleontology and other applications of our methods.