What is the prehistory of Russian accent alternationsalso found in other Slavic languages and Lithuanian? With this question as its main focus, the volume examines the accentuation systems of a number of Indo-European languages. With its comprehensive history of research it serves as an introduction to the field of Balto-Slavic and Indo-European accentology.

Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed ancestor of the Slavic languages, presents a rich inflectional system inherited from Proto-Indo-European. In this handbook all the inflectional endings of Proto-Slavic are traced back to Proto-Indo-European through a systematic comparison with the corresponding forms in related languages. Applying a redefinition of Proto-Slavic based on prehistoric loanword relations with neighbouring non-Slavic languages, Thomas Olander provides a new look at the Proto-Slavic inflectional system. The systematic, coherent and exhaustive approach laid out in the handbook paves...

Dispersals and diversification offers linguistic and archaeological perspectives on the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Two chapters discuss the early phases of the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European from an archaeological perspective, integrating and interpreting the new evidence from ancient DNA. Six chapters analyse the intricate relationship between the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, probably the first one to separate, and the remaining branches. Three chapters are concerned with the most important unsolved problems of...