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The concluding chapter discusses how the conscious creation of specific linguistic forms by speakers contributes to specific forms of deliberate language change, and how language necessarily—because of its relation to power—is polylectal and hence is characterized by the application of varying norms and normative strategies. One central thesis here is that after having understood the principle types, forms, functions, and usage of manipulated languages, we have to reject the discussion of manipulated languages as pidginized languages or creoles. As variation appears to be a principle element of language, manipulation contra a “standard” form needs to be understood as one of the basic features of linguistic praxis.

This chapter explores the politics of linguistic change and the investments in narratives of progress and declension. It explains that theory has become a battle flag, despite the notorious vagaries of the term. It clarifies that recent accounts of the rise of theory have blamed either reactionary European imports or the segmentation of the academic market for leading people astray. It argues that earlier changes in the ways people talk about language, history, and culture prepared the ground for the ways they think about history and theory today.

This chapter examines linguistic and religious changes through an analysis of the temples of the Fayoum Oasis in Egypt during the Roman period. It reflects on the contributions that new evidence has brought to light in the last ten years to the question of the way in which Coptic arose in the Roman period and became a crucial language and script for early Christianity.

Chapter 4 focuses on three particular linguists, all of whom consider whether, from the perspective of Saussure’s work, a linguistic revolution is possible. One, S. I. Kartsevskii, does not want such a revolution and believes Saussure tells us why it is not possible. Another, G. O. Vinokur, both desires it and believes Saussure has provided tools for its realization. A third, Lev Iakubinskii, shares Vinokur’s enthusiasm but sees Saussure’s linguistics as an obstacle. The problem is not one of misinterpretation, for this varied reception reveals the striking inconsistency and ambiguity of Saussure’s conservative conception of consent and change in language.

Chapter 5 borrows Walter Benjamin’s description of the ‘narcotic historicism’ of nineteenth-century Paris (expressed in its arcades, panoramas, wax museums, and architecture) and applies it to comparative philology, suggesting that, in effect, it creates ‘museums’ of language. In this perspective, some forms of twentieth-century modernism appear as attempts to liberate the force bound up in historicist forms; Saussure, Bakhtin, and Benjamin unleash the productivity and creativity of language that had been explained (and confined) in the phonetic laws discovered in the previous century. Bakhtin does so by counterpoising heteroglossia with myth; Saussure does so by invoking a model of linguistic change modelled on urban life and the republican social contract; Benjamin does so in his theory of translation, which aims to recover a native linguistic energy from the diversity of actual languages. In their different ways, these paeans to linguistic productivity draw attention to another feature of mass democracy: its urban character.

Chapter 2 describes the phonological development. Both languages underwent fundamental changes in quantity and prosodic structure. Open syllable lengthening (and sometimes consonant lengthening) eliminated light stressed syllables, and ‘overlong (superheavy)’ syllables were eliminated by vowel shortening and led to substantive changes in vowel qualities. Widespread diphthongization of long vowels affected both languages, and old short vowels were lowered in Icelandic. This prevented large scale mergers of old short and long vowels. A change called ‘the West Nordic consonant shift’ affected the obstruent system, so that aspiration (both post‐ and preaspiration) developed, and new postvocalic unaspirated stops fill some gaps left by the aspitation of the old fortis coda consonants. A particularly interesting development is the Verschärfung, occurring in Faroese, creating geminate stops in historical hiatus forms. The historical distinction between weak or ‘restricted’ and ‘full’ syllables valid in Common West Nordic is maintained in Faroese but abolished in Icelandic.

This chapter discusses the fact that natural languages are pieces of social reality. Due to settling, forms of behaviour become ‘standard’ in any given community. The notion of social reality is analysed, as well as the open question of how it comes into being, lending a community its ‘identity’. The processes that lead to the identity of any particular language and the maintenance thereof through time, are unclear. Many linguistic features ‘jell’ in arbitrary ways unrelated to culture or functionality, thereby enhancing semantic opacity and increasing learning load. A counterweight to this arbitrariness is that all languages are subject to universal restrictions, as discussed in Chapter 3. Topics discussed are the arbitrary extension of semantic categories, semantic bleaching, auxiliation, choice of perfective tense auxiliaries, truth conditions versus use conditions, forced creolization processes—whereby new (Creole) languages arise within the time span of one generation, as in the case of Sranan (Surinam)—and to ‘the heteromorphy problem’ whereby humans do not all speak in the universal language of semantic form.

Chapter 4 investigates the long-term consequences of the association between Rome and the Italians. This chapter looks at changes in institutions and laws that occurred in the Republican period, as well as systems of weights, measures, and coinage, which varied widely throughout Italy. Secondly, this chapter discusses how wealth was invested in public and private building in Italy. Next, chapter 4 also looks in more detail at cultural and linguistic changes in Italy in the Republican period. Furthermore, the chapter discusses the concept of Italia and of an Italian identity, which emerged in the third and second centuries. Finally, this chapter discusses the attempts of the Romans to maintain the Italians’ loyalty, by making sure the benefits of association with Rome outweighed the disadvantages.

The focus of this chapter is grammar. Jane Austen is often cited by scholars to illustrate a particular grammatical feature in the history of English, yet her usage is sometimes conservative, sometimes ahead of changes going on in the language. It is thus not always characteristic of standard usage of the period. It is unlikely that she was greatly influenced by the normative grammars of the time. The chapter shows how her growing authorship contributed to a strong sense of awareness of what was appropriate in language (her own letters, the language of nonstandard speakers in her novels). Her grammar contains some dialectal characteristics, while it also changed across time and varied according to who she corresponded with in her letters. In one new linguistic feature she is found to hypercorrect, which confirms her sensitiveness to ongoing linguistic changes, even if she mostly lived a relatively secluded life.

This chapter assesses the particular language quirks of Beowulf’s transmission. The failure of the scribes to comprehend the language of Beowulf would not be relevant to the transmission of the text if the task of the scribe were to reproduce the letters encountered in the exemplar without modification. However, for the Anglo-Saxon scribe, the task of the mechanical reproduction of the text was complicated by the imperative to modify its superficial, nonstructural features. Language change frequently induced the scribes to make minor alterations to the text that inadvertently deprived it of sense, grammar, alliteration, or meter. These alterations offer valuable insights into the history of the English language—particularly, into some specific ways that the language had changed between the period when Beowulf was composed and the period when its extant manuscript was produced.

This chapter sketches the development from Proto-Germanic to Proto-Northwest Germanic and discusses some subsequent changes that were widely shared among Northwest Germanic dialects. In addition to discussions of sound changes narrowly datable to Proto-Northwest Germanic and those partially shared with Gothic, and a discussion of Proto-Northwest Germanic morphological innovations, the chapter treats a number of important innovations that are widespread but not uniform in North and West Germanic, at least some of which probably spread through a diversifying dialect continuum.

By the late 19th century, a caravan trade extended from the Indian and Atlantic littorals through the hinterlands of south central Africa. Industrial commodities—guns, cloths, iron, and beads—were exchanged for ivory, slaves, beeswax, and rubber. Along the trade routes and in trading centers, words spread to describe new commodities, new peoples, new trading customs, and new forms of political power. These Wanderwörter originated in the languages of the coastal traders, in particular in Portuguese and Kiswahili. When the diverse vernaculars of the south central African interior were transcribed by colonial-era missionaries into “tribal” languages, such wandering words were incorporated into these languages, often disguised by distinctive orthographies. Other words were left out of dictionaries and political vocabularies, replaced by supposedly more authentic and archaic words. Examining these wandering words provides a window into linguistic dynamism and political-economic change prior to European conquest.

Lexicography in China under the rule of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was intimately tied up with empire. The Qing Empire was plurilingual; with the support of the Chinese elite, dominated by scholar-officials from the lower Yangtze region, the Manchu khans ruled as Confucian emperors, at the same time safeguarding a place for their own language in the polity. In this context, the bilingual elite undertook various lexicographical projects aspiring to greater integration of the empire’s main languages: Manchu and Chinese. Within this context, Mårten Söderblom Saarela addresses Banihûn’s and Pu-gong’s Qing-Han wenhai (Manchu–Chinese Literary Ocean), a reworking of an eighteenth-century poetic Chinese dictionary. He compares this bilingual project to an unfinished Chinese–French dictionary inspired by the same source. At a time of linguistic and social change in China, Banihûn and Pu-gong aspired to further integrate the empire’s two literary languages and thereby to provide a resource for lettered bannermen such as themselves and to maintain what they knew to be the fragile equilibrium of relations between these languages.

This chapter sketches the development from Proto-Northwest Germanic to Proto-West Germanic and discusses some subsequent changes that were widely shared among West Germanic dialects. It resembles the preceding chapter in organization but is much more detailed because of the much greater number of West Germanic changes. Topics covered include: Proto-West Germanic sound changes; Proto-West Germanic morphological innovations; parallel developments in West Germanic, divided into post-PWGmc sound changes and post-PWGmc morphological changes. A chart of the relative chronology of sound changes from Proto-Germanic to and beyond Proto-West Germanic closes the chapter.