This chapter introduces the aims and structure of the book, familiarizes the reader with key concepts (variants and variables, probabilistic grammars, comparative sociolinguistics, regional variation, indigenization, etc.) and the various subfields of linguistics that are relevant, and sketches the design of the study.

The chapter deals with the Indo-Iranian subfamily, its internal division and characteristic features, and its relation to the other subfamilies. While it shows some interesting unique features, it also often agrees with other branches in particular ones. While some of these are common archaisms, sometimes only attested in a few branches due to the different times of attestation, others are innovations, but mostly they can be parallel or part of an areal spread. Thus, no other branch can be clearly shown to be the nearest relative of Indo-Iranian.

In this chapter the editors introduce the book and its aim of showing how the study of comparative and historical data from the Romance languages can illuminate general linguistics. After a brief presentation of the volume and its structure, the editors reflect on how their personal experiences of working with data from the Romance languages have led them to reflect on wider issues in general ling uistics. Recurrent themes in their work have been, respectively, morphosyntactic change (Ledgeway) and sound change and its morphological consequences (Maiden). Among the topics whose theoretical implications are explored are: parametric variation, universals, typological variation, pro-drop, word order, linguistic theory and philology, complementizer systems, the interaction of phonological and morphological factors in morphologization, the problem of defining a language family, and the perils of ‘standard language bias’ in the practice of historical linguistics. While these may appear a quite heterogeneous set of issues, they are treated in a way that prompts some major shared fundamental conclusions, in particular that Romance linguistics can make its most powerful contributions to general linguistics when Romance linguists exploit to the maximum the extraordinary wealth of historical and comparative data which the Romance languages and dialects offer them.

Chapter 1 establishes the foundation upon which the dialectical debates about fangyan and nation building were built by discussing conceptions of Chinese local languages before the twentieth century. It begins by summarizing the two primary ways oral languages were studied and rendered in Qing China: first, as phonologies categorized in rime tables and dictionaries that supported philological studies of classical texts; and second, as representatives of localized vernaculars in songbooks, theater, or fictional writings. The second half of this chapter turns to Western sojourners granted access to the Qing’s interiors through Britain’s victory in the Opium Wars (1842 and 1860). Protestant missionaries, who studied local languages so as to proselytize to non-elites, filtered the Qing’s linguistic landscape through their own histories: they branded the written classical as a Latin-like dead language, and reframed local languages as “dialects” or “vernaculars.” By offering their own theories on the origin of a Chinese language, these missionaries simultaneously highlighted the lack of a standardized Chinese national language and made dialects a central point of access for finding or inventing one.