This chapter provides a brief overview of the shared phonological phenomena found in northern Europe, including preaspiration, tonal accents, sonorant preocclusion, and a few others. It then introduces the varieties analysed in the book, noting their genealogical affiliation, their geographical and sociohistorical context, and the role of language contact in their development. The discussion proceeds by geographical region and historical period rather than by genealogical grouping, covering mainland Fennoscandia, the Baltic littoral, and Britain and Ireland before and after the intrusion of Germanic, and the world of the North Atlantic islands. It also briefly lays out the theoretical argument of the book, highlighting in particular how the phonological convergences discussed in the subsequent chapters are the product of Sapirian drift and how the theoretical tools proposed in the book are able to account for such convergence, even in unrelated languages.

This chapter presents a comprehensive analysis of the history of preaspiration in the North Germanic languages. Building on a wide range of both traditional and more recent instrumental investigations, it develops an account that puts a theoretically informed model of phonology at the heart of the analysis, in preference to other criteria used in recent work, such as ‘normative’ status. The analysis is set within the wider context of the Germanic language family and its phonological development, in particular the role of moraic quantity. In addition to preaspiration itself, the chapter provides novel accounts of several related phenomena, most notably the lenition of intervocalic stops. It demonstrates that the life-cycle model offers a clear and consistent account of typological variation in patterns of preaspiration across the entire North Germanic family, allowing us to trace its history from a stage preceding the North Germanic protolanguage to the multifarious developments in present-day vernaculars.

This chapter lays out the theoretical devices on which the subsequent analysis builds. The first section introduces the phonological architecture used in the book, and in particular the distinction between the phonological, phonetic-phonological, and phonetic levels of representation, which underpin the notion of the life cycle that is central to the book’s argument. The second section recaps current views on the mechanisms of language contact and the role that phonological patterns can play under different contact scenarios. This is followed by a discussion of areal effects in phonology generally and some case studies beyond northern Europe, which exemplify various possibilities for recovering the history of contact from attested phonological patterns. The third section discusses the mechanisms of phonological convergence and the possible uses of sound patterns in diagnosing language contact in the past. Finally, the fourth section lays out the theory of the life cycle of phonological processes and introduces key related notions such as rule scattering and rule generalization, and lays out a proposal for how the life cycle can be used in examining language contact in the past.

This chapter offers a general discussion of the phonetics and phonology of stop preaspiration, a central empirical concern of the book, in both synchronic and diachronic perspective. Preaspiration has a reputation as a cross-linguistically unusual feature, and I argue that this exoticization has hindered a more critical approach. Building on recent empirical work that has contributed to demystifying this phenomenon, the chapter lays the groundwork for the analysis of preaspiration in subsequent chapters. It presents the general approach to the phonetics and phonology of laryngeal contrast employed in the book; justifies the definition of preaspiration and analytical criteria used in subsequent analyses; and provides an explicit account of how preaspiration is expected to develop diachronically within the context of the life cycle. The chapter also offers critical discussion of the link between preaspiration and consonant quantity, a recurrent theme in the literature that is relevant to all the case studies considered later in the book. It concludes with a brief account of phenomena allied to preaspiration such as sonorant devoicing, and their import for the book’s argument.

This chapter lays out the history of research on areality in northern Europe, with particular attention to phonological features and the relationship between the observed convergences and language contact. It covers the origins of typological thinking and some theories of contact and substrate in nineteenth-century historical linguistics; the rise of ‘holistic’ typological approaches that would go on to play an important role in how twentieth-century scholars approached the issues central to the book; the development of areal linguistics by the Prague School and the importance of phonology to this endeavour; the contribution of Norwegian Celticists to many of the problems discussed in the book; the important work of Heinrich Wagner, who posited a phonological ‘linguistic landscape’ in northern Europe; responses to Wagner’s work; approaches problematizing contact origins of the features discussed; and the current state of the field.

This chapter offers a reconstruction of the development of preaspiration in the Sámi languages. Like the Celtic languages, this family shows extensive microvariation in synchronic patterns of preaspiration. I argue that the clear demarcation between phonetic-phonological and phonological rules offered by the life-cycle model provides new insights into both synchronic patterns and diachronic developments known from the literature. Preaspiration in the Sámi languages exhibits particularly intricate interactions with phonological quantity; the chapter shows how they can be understood in terms of both phonetic and phonological rules in different languages. It is argued that the Sámi languages are particularly valuable in the context of the proposed theoretical framework due to the intricate interplay of phonetic and phonological patterns that shed new light in particular on the processes of rule scattering and rule generalization.

The chapter offers an evaluation of previous proposals that tie the development of preaspiration to language contact. Before examining individual contexts, the chapter provides an overview of what is currently known regarding the transfer of preaspiration patterns in bilingual situations, which is indispensable to a proper evaluation of its role in language contact in the past. It then proceeds to an analysis of existing proposals for contact origins of preaspiration: these include interference from unknown substrates, Sámi-Germanic contact, and Germanic-Celtic contact (particularly transfer from North Germanic to Gaelic). It is argued that in most cases the case for contact remains unproven. From a structural perspective, the results of the previous chapters all show preaspiration to have developed along the life cycle, like most other endogenous sound changes. The chapter also offers an analysis of the sociocultural context, which also turns out to be less than favourable to contact-based accounts. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of how an areal approach to preaspiration might be applied in northern Europe and elsewhere, including a possible area in Southern Siberia.

The chapter offers a summary of the book’s argument regarding the analysis of convergent development (drift) as arising from a combination of parallel histories guided by the life cycle and similar starting points. It pinpoints the role of metrical structure, and in particular moraic quantity, as key to understanding these convergences. It also offers further perspectives on the possible origins of these similarities, and asks whether we might be justified in treating phonological convergences as areally significant.

This chapter outlines the topic of the book: a set of unusual phonological features concentrated in the languages of north-western Europe, especially Germanic (North Germanic and to an extent English), Celtic (particularly the Gaelic languages), and Uralic (especially the Sámi languages). It also introduces the overall argument of the book: language contact played a smaller role in the rise of these similarities than generally argued in previous scholarship; instead, the convergences we observe are often the effect of parallel developments driven by the life cycle of phonological processes.