This chapter outlines the history of the development and spread of what became what we now know as the Sinitic (Chinese) languages and the effects that migrations, cultural contact, and national policies had on the development. This includes the initial migrations into Asia and then again from the Yellow River valley to the surrounding areas. These later migrations were generally into areas where other people already lived, and so there was mixing of the people and the cultures. This is one factor that created the different branches of Sinitic (“Chinese dialects”). The last section is on language coexistence in Modern China.

Chapter 7 is about the colonial comparative construction in Q’eqchi’-Maya. It analyzes the form and function of various tokens of this construction, as found in a colonial grammar. It compares this colonial construction with the modern comparative construction, showing how they differ and elucidating the historical relation that connects them. It shows that both constructions were present in the colonial period, overlapped for some time in their comparative function, and are still in use today. At some point around the middle-to-end of the nineteenth century, the colonial construction gave up its comparative function (retaining its original spatial usage, along with a secondary metaphorical usage), and the modern construction took on its comparative function (while retaining its original spatial usage). It argues that the colonial construction did not evolve into the modern construction. Rather, both constructions are part of a larger comparative complex, involving many variants, that has long been active.

The chapter begins with the discussion of the story about the tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues (Gen 11.1–9), the event which was usually but not always understood as the start of linguistic diversification. The chapter explores early Christian ideas about the primordial language, usually identified with Hebrew. The history of Hebrew and the attempts of late antique Christians to define their relations to this would-be original tongue occupy the larger part of the chapter. Fourth- and fifth-century writers discussed whether the original tongue ceased or continued to exist after Babel, and who – Heber or Abraham – was instrumental in preserving the original tongue. These biblical figures and various scenarios of language history they represented were claimed by competing Christian and Jewish historical discourses. These linguistic discussions contributed to consolidating their corresponding religious identities. The alternatives to the idea of Hebrew’s primordiality were also attested; they bear witness to the continuous debates about originality, ontological power, and the relative prestige of languages in Late Antiquity. The chapter attempts to reconstruct Christian attitudes to the linguistic diversity, their views on the history and evolution of other (non-Hebrew) languages, and to contextualize ideas about the language of God in Jewish–Christian polemics.

This chapter tackles several interrelated issues around the Kurdish language. It provides a general internal classification of Kurdish varieties, proposing also a theoretically informed distinction between language history and collective identity perceptions of speakers to resolve the classification disputes around Zazaki and Gorani varieties. ‘Kurdish’ in this sense is considered more a sociolinguistic unit than a purely linguistic entity. The chapter then provides summary discussion of the position of Iranian philology on the history of Kurdish, whereby it is shown that Kurdish is not in a direct descendant relationship with any of the known languages of the Old and Middle Iranian periods. The chapter traces the history of written and literary Kurmanji Kurdish. The rise of literary or written code in Kurmanji is shown to have taken place in late sixteenth century within the wider sociopolitical context of, on one hand, the emergence of powerful Kurdish principalities and widespread madrasa education, and, on the other hand, a general trend in the vernacularization of local community languages in Kurdistan. Finally, the development of modern Kurmanji as a polycentric variety is discussed and the current approximation of written norms are projected to merge in a more comprehensive plurinormative Kurmanji standard.