The most shocking changes in the near future will involve the sharp decline in the world’s linguistic diversity, as massive numbers of languages cease to be spoken. The focus of this chapter is endangered languages, why the problem is so serious, what has brought it about, and what can be done about it.

How do words change their meaning? This chapter examines semantic change, change in meaning. It reveals the various ways in which words change their meanings and explains what is behind each kind of change, with telling examples from the history of English.

This chapter is dedicated to borrowed words. Its mission is to explain how and why languages borrow words from other languages and how loanwords are dealt with. It is organized around the loans in English from particular languages, presented in such a way that the contents of the loanwords dealt with reveal the stories of the language contacts that led to the borrowings.

Languages can develop different dialects in different regions. Then, as further changes accumulate, speakers of the different dialects may no longer be able to understand one another. When that happens, these formerly different dialects become distinct but related languages, members of a language family. Linguistic classification is about these relationships among languages. This chapter is about the world’s language families, and about how languages are classified. It delves into the questions of what it takes to show that languages are related to one another and belong to the same language family. The major language families of the world are introduced. The comparative method is introduced and illustrated, and its huge role in explaining language history is revealed. Some of the better-known but nevertheless controversial proposals of distant linguistic kinship are also evaluated.

This chapter satisfies curiosities about exceptions and why things don’t fit expected patterns by explaining the sound changes which resulted in such examples as goose/geese, wife/wives, child/children, holy but holiday and how verbs such as sing/sang/sung got to be that way. Addressing these irregularities explains in a straightforward way what sound change is, how it produced these oddities. The examples provide an understanding of the major sound changes that affect the history of English – Grimm’s Law, the Great Vowel Shift, umlaut, and others. The question of whether sound change is good or bad is answered.

The narrative that America was founded by British religious refugee immigrants in search of a place to freely establish their New Israel, a city on a hill, is mired in historical revisionism and uncritically taught in school curricula that has legitimized the policy of removing ‘uncivilized’ Native peoples to allow for the settlement of ‘the empty land’ by superior ‘civilized’ white European settlers. The religious justification for the well-documented illiberal, illegal, and immoral behavior of government dealings with Native Americans has, in general, been ignored because it does not comport with a benevolent (patriotic) interpretation of American identity, an identity that was largely constructed in the first decades of the nineteenth century and has persisted to the present day. The myth that the United States is a Christian nation is not only a fabrication; its continued existence poses an actual danger to the health and survival of the American experiment, an experiment that is based on secular principles of equal justice under law and the strict separation of church and state in all aspects of state functions, policies, and powers.

This chapter explores the concept of a lexicon, introduces the notion of the mental lexicon, and raises the question of how we decide what the set of words are that are in a language. It then moves to a focus on borrowing as a lexical source in the history of Chinese, analyzing borrowings in terms of (1) the time period; (2) the contact situation; (3) the mechanism of borrowing; (4) the morphological structure of the borrowed words. Finally, recent changes in the Mandarin lexicon driven by social media and the internet are described and analyzed.

In this chapter, the might of analogical change is in focus. It exemplifies and explains the several kinds of analogy: proportional analogy, folk etymology, hypercorrection, and so on. Readers come to understand how sound change and analogy are interrelated, that sound changes. Although sound changes are regular in their application, they often create irregularities in related forms, as in mouse/mice or in ride/rode/ridden; analogical change often eliminates the irregularities, for example, changing strive/strove/striven to strive/strived/strived for many speakers of English.

This chapter traces the history of Chinese writing from its creation and early development through to the establishment of the standard traditional script, emphasizing the structural components of the Chinese characters as a reflection of its history. Traditional Chinese classifications of Chinese character structure are introduced through the framework of the Han dynasty dictionary Shuo wen jie zi.

This chapter discusses what it means for a word to have meaning. Starting with the classical traditions in the West and the East about the nature of meaning, the connections between the word and the object it refers to (reference), and a set of inherent and defining properties which determines the referent (sense). It then moves on to the modern analysis of types of meaning, and introduces the way linguists characterize word meanings through semantic analysis. Major lexical relations, including hyponymy/hypernymy, antonymy, synonymy, polysemy, homonymy and homophony, are discussed. This chapter also introduces the notion of collocation.