After an outline of the basis of scientific historical linguistics, this chapter discusses what can be learned about Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the earliest recoverable ancestor of English, from archaeology and the study of ancient DNA. It then discusses some characteristics of PIE, outlines how its daughter languages diversified and sketches how Proto-Germanic developed. The chapter closes with a survey of words of PIE and its immediate daughter languages that survive in Modern English (ModE). A special theme is the first- and second-person pronouns, whose development is sketched very briefly from PIE to ModE.

English is a member of the Germanic subgroup of Indo-European, sharing with other Germanic languages a distinctive set of hallmarks, though recent developments have made it in some respects an outlier in this group. In addition, English shares some features with successively smaller subsets of these languages. The observed pattern of similarities and differences arises from a history of shared inheritance, divergence and subsequent interaction which can be reconstructed in detail by systematically comparing the languages, guided by a rigorous methodology. A focus of scholarship for two centuries, this enterprise has taken on renewed vitality in recent decades, informed by new understandings of the role of language contact in shaping linguistic histories. After a brief introduction to the process of comparative reconstruction and the traditional representation of the pedigree of English derived from it, this chapter will introduce the more intricate picture emerging from recent studies.

Chapter 8 reveals that languages change over time, with new variants developing and others going obsolete. This chapter aims, firstly, at giving the reader insights into the phenomenon of language change, which has resulted in a wide variety of languages spread throughout our planet that can be grouped into language many families that will be surveyed. We will ask why languages change and provide examples of changes that affect different parts of the grammar, with special attention to grammaticalization. We stress that languages are not getting better or worse as a result of these changes. While we see that under the right circumstances a language can “split” and develop into two or more different languages, attention is also paid to the fact that languages can go extinct. With that general background, we can ask whether the study of language change has resulted in an argument that could support the Innateness Hypothesis for language. To this end, we will ask whether there are certain properties of languages that are immune to change and if so, whether this can be explained if we assume that these properties are anchored in the innate system?

Chapter 7 first considers some general issues regarding the classification of languages, such as the contrast between language and dialect. The chapter then explores how languages can be grouped into families based on their historical relationships and what types of evidence are needed to prove such family relationships among languages. It looks at how ancestral languages such as Proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed on the basis of their present-day descendants. In subsequent sections, typological classifications are discussed. Since languages vary in many different ways on several levels—by the sounds they employ, word-structure patterns, word orders, and the ways certain meanings are expressed—numerous typological classifications can be devised. Throughout the chapter, three such classifications are examined, one based on morphological structures, another based on the syntactic factors such as word order, and one based on semantic properties of the languages being classified. Readers will explore how language classifications can change over time and how the two types of classifications—familial and typological—correspond.

This chapter covers several issues in language classification: the distinction between a language, a dialect, and an accent; how and why languages are classified into families; how the ancestral language of a given family can be reconstructed; how languages diversify and how related languages come about. A separate section is dedicated to the documentation of languages “in the field.” The final section is concerned with the issue of language mapping; various resources offering language maps are discussed.