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 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.