We propose to edit a second volume of the highly successful 2003 Handbook of Historical Linguistics (HoHL1), keeping key chapters (with some updating) from that book that give an overview of essential subareas within historical linguistics, redoing a few chapters which are important but were less than successful in the 2003 tome, reprinting a chapter from a different Blackwell Handbook, and adding many new topics that complement and supplement HoHL1. We do not duplicate the latter’s long introduction (it may be turned into a separate monograph) but instead give a more standard, brief introduction laying out the rationale for a 2nd volume.
By way of situating this second volume in a broader context of handbooks, and of clarifying its relation to the 2003 volume, let us say that we feel strongly that just updating each chapter would not yield the best possible book, largely because the essential issues in historical linguistics that are so well covered in HoHL1 have not changed all that much in the decade since its publication. Further, in HoHL1,we deliberately included several chapters on the same topic (e.g., for sound-change: Mark Hale on the Neogrammarian approach, Gregory Guy on the variationist approach, and Paul Kiparsky on the phonologically based approach), since we felt it was important to give a sense of the points on which there is legitimate debate and controversy. However, with those controversies aired there, there is no need for re-including all of the scholarly back-and-forth and varying viewpoints. Readers interested in seeing scholars go back and forth on certain topics can still get that from HoHl1. This is the basis for our decision to keep only chapters dealing directly with core matters in the discipline (= sound change, analogy, semantic change, etc.) and to ask the respective authors for updates (especially as regards bibliography) for those and only those.
The new topics that will be the basis for the other chapters will also allow for an expansion of the language coverage in this 2nd volume. HoHL1 came in for some criticism — unfairly, in our opinion — for being too centered on Indo-European languages (though it included chapters that were largely based on Australian languages, on Siouan, and on other American Indian families). Thus, one beneficial step in the desired direction comes from the extension of crosslinguistic coverage via the inclusion of Asian languages in connection with the tonogenesis chapter in Part I (inasmuch as a large number of diachronic tonal studies have drawn on various languages of Asia, including many from the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman groupings) and via the inclusion of a chapter on the diachrony of signed language — to mention just two examples.
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