Department of Language and Linguistic Science

Historical and anthropological linguistics

Historical linguistics

'Sound Comparisons': Dialect and Language Comparison and Classification by Phonetic Similarity
Based at the University of Edinburgh, this project seeks to 'develop and explore methods for measuring the degree of phonetic similarity between accents of English; English and other Germanic languages and varieties; Germanic and Romance languages; and varieties of the two main indigenous language families spoken in the Andes, Quechua and Aymara.
Old English Pages
BBC Radio 4 'Routes of English'

Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim
Edward Sapir's Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech
The classic text, available here in its entirety.
Less Commonly Taught Languages
The Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Project operates under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota. Less commonly taught languages include all of the world's languages except English, French, German, and Spanish.
Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
The MPI's Department of Linguistics investigates the diversity of human language and the historical processes underlying this diversity.
Two sites (1) and (2) dedicated to Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914)
...the founder of American pragmatism (or 'pragmaticism'), extender of the Scotistic theory of signs ('semeiotic'), extraordinarily prolific logician and mathematician, and developer of an evolutionary, psycho-physically monistic metaphysical system.
On the 'Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow' myth (1)

Thanks to Dr. Alex King, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, for the links in this section.