THE HANDBOOK OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS. Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. xviii + 882. $146.95 cloth.

This is the latest of some 15 volumes in Blackwell's series Handbooks in Linguistics. The volume reviewed here—although not without interest to specialists in SLA—is probably of less interest to readers of this journal than others of the series (e.g., The handbook of second language acquisition edited by Doughty & Long, 2003). All volumes included in the series are handbooks only in the sense of including presentations of basic knowledge; in reality, they are lengthy books that go well beyond such basics. Closely related to this title is The handbook of language variation and change (Chambers, Trudgill, & Schilling-Estes, 2003), which is concerned with the interface of historical and sociolinguistics.