Introduction

Language change and linguistic diversity are topics that have long traditions in comparative linguistics. One of the earliest seminal works was Conrad Gessner's 1555 book Mithridate (Gessner et al. 2009), which presented and analyzed data on more than 100 languages known at that time, using the Lord's Prayer and word lists as samples for cross-linguistic comparisons. Central to Gessner's work was his perception of language change and diversity in time and space. His corpora combined languages from ancient and contemporary times that he assumed would reveal how languages diversified from a common ancestor (Hebrew). Furthermore, Gessner invested in the collection and presentation of data about languages from diverse geographical locations, including the poorly attested, recently documented and “exotic” languages of the Orbis noui, that is, the territories of present-day Americas, Oceania, and Eastern Asia, discovered by Portugal and Spain during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (Colombat 2008).

Approaches to language change and linguistic diversity have indeed evolved since then, and they have culminated in the development of specific fields of investigation, especially historical linguistics (HL), language documentation (LD), and linguistic typology (LT). This book continues to explore the topics of language change and linguistic diversity, bringing forth contributions highlighting how research on language change and linguistic diversity relies crucially on the innovations, intersections, and mutual contributions of HL, LD, and LT. In this introductory chapter, we highlight scholarly contributions to the investigation of language change and linguistic diversity at the crossroads of these fields, highlighting how language change, diversity, HL, LD, and LT are symbiotically interrelated as part of a widely developed research program that continues to evolve rapidly in Linguistics.

The volume showcases practical and theoretical case studies dealing with language change and linguistic diversity, bringing a key contribution to the field by its focus on a diverse range of languages which have not often been at the center of traditional language change research, and by exploring the junctures between language change, linguistic diversity, and other related topics that draw on primary linguistic fieldwork. The chapters of this volume cover distinct geographical areas and a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues.