With nearly 2400 entries, this dictionary covers every aspect of historical linguistics, from the most venerable work to the exciting advances of the late 20th century. All of the traditional terms appear here, but so are the terms introduced more recently in connection with various subjects such as: Pidgin and Creole languages; the sociolinguistic study of language change; mathematical and computational methods; the novel approaches to linguistic geography; the controversial proposals of new and vast language families; and the attempts at relating the results of historical linguistics to those of the archaeologists, the anthropologists and the geneticists. There are linguistic examples of the terms that are defined, along with cross-references to related terms and the original literature.