This is the latest of some 15 volumes in Blackwell's series Handbooks in Linguistics. The volume reviewed here—although not without interest to specialists in SLA—is probably of less interest to readers of this journal than others of the series (e.g., The handbook of second language acquisition edited by Doughty & Long, 2003). All volumes included in the series are handbooks only in the sense of including presentations of basic knowledge; in reality, they are lengthy books that go well beyond such basics. Closely related to this title is The handbook of language variation and change (Chambers, Trudgill, & Schilling-Estes, 2003), which is concerned with the interface of historical and sociolinguistics.

The handbook of historical linguistics has a wide-ranging and entertaining—if rather dense and rambling—introduction by the editors and includes 25 articles all written by scholars expert on their topics (e.g., Bybee, Campbell, Heine, Kiparsky, Lightfoot, and Ohala, just to mention 6). Articles are grouped in six sections: “Methods for Studying Language Change,” “Sound Change,” “Morphological and Lexical Change,” “Syntactic Change,” “Pragmato-semantic Change,” and “Explaining Linguistic Change.”

Certain chapters will be of greater interest to those working in SLA. These include Thomason's “Contact as a Source of Language Change” (which is relevant in relation to transfer or interference in SLA); Heine's “Grammaticalization” (which discusses the reanalysis of lexical material as concerning grammar—for example, Old English one was reduced phonetically and semantically as an indefinite article a/an); Harris's “Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Syntactic Change;” Guy's “Variationist Approaches to Phonological Change” (which is concerned with sociolinguistic motivations in change as in usage); and Aitchison's “Psycholinguistic Perspectives.”

Historical linguistics, which is also termed diachronic linguistics (a term employed in the useful dichotomy of diachronic vs. synchronic linguistics), is the focus of language study from which modern linguistics emerged; 19th-century studies of language relationships exposed the lawlike behavior of language, notably through the discoveries of Grimm (the regularity of sound change) and Verner (the seeming exceptionlessness of sound change). Saussure, whose Course in general linguistics is often credited as founding synchronic linguistics, was first a diachronic linguist.

Although diachronic linguistics was thought unimportant in Chomskian generative linguistics and disappeared from the list of required courses in many, if not most, American universities, it might be returning to importance. This is perhaps because of renewed emphasis on minimalist abstract universals (including a would-be finite list of constraints in Optimality Theory) and the realization that regularities of language change might reflect these universals as well as does first language acquisition and better than do native-speaker intuitions of grammaticality.

Chapters of this Handbook are in many cases arguments for cutting-edge positions of their authors: Ohala's explanation of the relatively rare cases of dissimilatory change (pp. 669–686), Heine's counterargument to the claim that grammaticalization is not a special case of language change (pp. 575–601), and Bybee's presentation of evidence of the importance of frequency in grammaticalization (pp. 602–623; extensively developed in her 2001 book).

A case in point concerns an old and contentious issue in historical linguistics: the regularity of sound change versus lexical diffusion (the seeming limitation of sound change to certain words or to the exclusion of certain words). Kiparsky argues the neogrammarian position—that sound change occurs in regular, phonetically defined environments and oblivious to the particularity of words (pp. 313–342). However, the counterevidence of lexical diffusion has been around since the first dialectologists, with their claim that every word has its own history. The issue is of fundamental importance for the theory of language: whether there exists a sound system independent of the arbitrary sound-meaning relations of the lexicon. Kiparsky argues—and the editors Joseph and Janda agree (p. 115)—that the evidence of lexical diffusion arises only as the result of analogy and dialect borrowing, after a regular sound change has ceased to be effective.

This position is presented, unfortunately, without contrast to the different—if perhaps compatible—claim of Labov (although he is not among the authors of the Handbook, he endorses it on the jacket). According to Labov, lexical diffusion happens after a sound change achieves a level of abstractness or consciousness for a speaker (cf. Labov, 1994).

This criticism is not meant to cancel a confident recommendation of this book to those interested in fundamental findings and current issues in historical linguistics.