This volume offers a selection of 19 papers from those read at the 8th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics in Edinburgh. Many of the writers are established authorities in the field, but there are also significant contributions from a younger generation of scholars. The topics discussed span the whole history of English from the Common Germanic period to the present century and the book also includes, as appropriate to the Conference venue, a number of papers on aspects of the historical development of Scots and Scottish English.

The rich variety of the English vocabulary reflects the vast number of words it has taken from other languages. These range from Latin, Greek, Scandinavian, Celtic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian to, among others, Hebrew, Maori, Malay, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Yiddish. Philip Durkin's full and accessible history reveals how, when, and why. He shows how to discover the origins of loanwords, when and why they were adopted, and what happens to them once they have been.

The book The Nature of Language addresses one of the most fundamental questions of mankind: how did language evolve, and what are the neurobiological and cognitive foundations of language processing? This monograph explores these questions from different perspectives to discuss the building blocks of language evolution and how they developed in the way they can be found in modern humans.

The idea behind the book is that the paradigm of European national languages (official orthography; language standardization; full use of language in most everyday contexts) is imposed in cookie-cutter fashion on many language revitalization projects of Native American languages. This is the offical language model. While this model fits the sovereign status of many Native American groups, it does not meet the linguistic ideology of Native American communities, and creates projects and products that do not engage the communities which they are created to serve