Frontmatter -- Contents -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. The discovery of Indo-European -- Chapter 3. Writing: Its history and its decipherment -- Chapter 4. Sound change -- Chapter 5. Analogy and change in word structure -- Chapter 6. Syntactic change -- Chapter 7. Semantic change -- Chapter 8. Lexical borrowing -- Chapter 9. Lexical change and etymology: The study of words -- Chapter 10. Language, dialect, and standard -- Chapter 11. Dialect geography and dialectology -- Chapter 12. Language spread, link languages, and bilingualism -- Chapter 13. Convergence: Dialectology beyond languageboundaries -- Chapter 14. Pidgins, creoles, and related forms of language -- Chapter 15. Language death -- Chapter 16. Comparative method: Establishing language relationship -- Chapter 17. Proto-World?: The question of long-distance genetic relationships -- Chapter 18. Historical linguistics, history, and prehistory: Linguistic paleontology and other applications of our methods -- Chapter notes and suggested readings -- Backmatter