This essay discusses the methods and achievements of historical and comparative linguistics and introduces some new possibilities of potential interest to historians. Its main components are language classification, linguistic reconstruction, and new models of language contact. While many historians are familiar with lexicostatistics, most comparative linguists working in Africa today use the longer and better established comparative method. This aims to establish relatedness between languages and between them and an ancestor language. It also aims at reconstructing ancestral languages from which later languages derive. Reconstruction and classification have been of most use to historians for events from 5000 BP to the recent past. Finally, linguists have recently been inspired by new case studies and by theoretical work outside historical linguistics. The traditional model, with largely static language communities affected by ‘borrowing’ deriving from lengthy geographical proximity, is being supplemented by a range of different contact types and of ways in which linguistic material is transferred. The view that most linguistic change is internal is being replaced by a model that views internal and external change as both important. Notes, ref., sum.
