These selected papers on historical linguistics cover a variety of languages, language families, and approaches to the study of language change, ranging from optimality theory to the linguistic consequences of political correctness. Two papers on Japanese, and three on Yiddish, are included.

1. Sound Laws: Reactions Present and Past (by Adamska-Salaciak, Arleta); 2. Passives in Western Malayo-Polynesian: An Asian Perspective (by Blake, Barry J.); 3. What can This Be?: A west African Contribution to Sranan (by Bruyn, Adrienne); 4. Grammmatical and Lexical Aspect in Akkadian and Proto-Semitic (by Bubenik, Vit); 5. Euphemism with Attitude: Politically Charged Language Change (by Burridge, Kate); 6. The Loss of the Voice Dimension Between Late Latin and Early Romance (by Cennamo, Michela); 7. How a Historical Linguist and a Native Speaker Understand a Complex Morphology (by Chafe, Wallace); 8. The Evolution of Grammar: Evidence from Indo-European Perfects (by Drinka, Bridget); 9. Yiddish and Hebrew: Borrowing Through Oral language Contact (by Gold, Elaine); 10. Degenerate Feet in Tacanan Languages: Unmarkedness in OT (by Jacobs, Haike); 11. The Evolution of O in Open Position: Parallel Developments in French and Dutch Dialects (by Jong, Thera de); 12. The Structure of ra-Deletion in Japanese (by Katada, Fusa); 13. Can Grammaticalization be Explained Invisible Handedly? (by Klausenburger, Jurgen); 14. Toward a 'Standard Yiddish' Pronounciation: An Instrumentally Aided Phonetic Analysis (by Kleine, Anke); 15. The Evolution of Adverbial Subordinators in Europe (by Kortmann, Bernd); 16. A corpus-Based Model for the Description of Language Change and Variation in Nominal Classification exemplified by Dutch Seventeenth Century Varieties (by Leuvensteijn, Arjan van); 17. Towards an Explanation of some Morphological Changes which 'Should Never Have Happened' (by Maiden, Martin); 18. On the Conservatism of Embedded Clauses (by Matsuda, Kenjiro); 19. Velars and Palatals in Old English Alliteration (by Minkova, Donka); 20. The Sequencing of Grammaticization Effects: A Twist from North America (by Mithun, Marianne); 21. What Research on Creole Genesis Can Contribute to Historical Linguistics (by Mufwene, Salikoko S.); 22. The Borrowing of Meaning as a Cause of Internal Syntactic Change (by Prince, Ellen F.); 23. Grammaticalization of Complex Verbal Constructions in Finnish (by Salminen, Taru); 24. Two Models for the Study of Language Contact: A Psycho-Linguistic perspective Versus a Socio-Cultural Perspective (by Smits, Caroline); 25. A Motivated Account of the Semantic Evolution of Watch and its Catalan Equivalents (by Verdaguer, Isabel); 26. Subject Index; 27. Index of Languages