This volume is an up-to-date history of phonology from the earliest known examples of phonological thinking through the rise of phonology as a field in the 20th century and up to the present time. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I, Early insights in phonology, begins with writing systems and has chapters devoted to the great ancient and medieval intellectual traditions of phonological thought that form the foundation of later thinking and continue to enrich phonological theory. Part II, The founders of phonology, describes the important schools and individuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who shaped phonology as an organized scientific field. Part III takes up Mid-twentieth-century developments in phonology in the Soviet Union, Northern and Western Europe, and North America; it continues with precursors to generative grammar, and culminates in a chapter on Chomsky & Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English (SPE). Part IV, Phonology after SPE, shows how phonological theorists responded to SPE with respect to derivations, representations, and phonology-morphology interaction. Theories discussed include Dependency Phonology, Government Phonology, Constraint-and-Repair theories, and Optimality Theory. This part ends with a chapter on the study of variation. Part V, New methods and approaches, has chapters on phonetic explanation, corpora and phonological analysis, probabilistic phonology, computational modelling, models of phonological learning, and the evolution of phonology. This exploration of the history of phonology from various viewpoints provides new perspectives on where phonology has been and throws light on where it is going.