The Linguistic Society of America presents the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award each year in recognition of a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to the understanding of language and linguistics.

The 2016 award winners are William Baxter and Dr. Laurent Sagart for their work Old Chinese.  Their book introduces a new linguistic reconstruction of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Old Chinese, the first Sino-Tibetan language to be reduced to writing.  Old Chinese is the language of the earliest Chinese classical texts (1st millennium BCE) and the ancestor of later varieties of Chinese, including all modern Chinese dialects.

The co-authors will receive their award on January 8, 2016 at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.