Provides a unique, up-to-date survey of twelve Germanic languages from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish.

Germanic - one of the largest sub-groups of the Indo-European language family - comprises 37 languages with an estimated 470 million speakers worldwide. This book presents a comparative linguistic survey of the full range of Germanic languages, both ancient and modern, including major world languages such as English and German (West Germanic), the Scandinavian (North Germanic) languages, and the extinct East Germanic languages. Unlike previous studies, it does not take a chronological or a language-by-language approach, organized instead around linguistic constructions and subsystems. Considering dialects alongside standard varieties, it provides a detailed account of topics such as case, word formation, sound systems, vowel length, syllable structure, the noun phrase, the verb phrase, the expression of tense and mood, and the syntax of the clause. Authoritative and comprehensive, this much-needed survey will be welcomed by scholars and students of the Germanic languages, as well as linguists across the many branches of the field.

This accessible introductory reference source surveys the linguistic and cultural background of the earliest known Germanic languages and examines their similarities and differences. The Languages covered include:Gothic Old Norse Old SaxonOld English Old Low Franconian Old High German Written in a lively style, each chapter opens with a brief cultural history of the people who used the language, followed by selected authentic and translated texts and an examination of particular areas including grammar, pronunciation, lexis, dialect variation and borrowing, textual transmission, analogy and drift.

History, archaeology, and human evolutionary genetics provide us with an increasingly detailed view of the origins and development of the peoples that live in Northwestern Europe. This book aims to restore the key position of historical linguistics in this debate by treating the history of the Germanic languages as a history of its speakers. It focuses on the role that language contact has played in creating the Germanic languages, between the first millennium BC and the crucially important early medieval period. Chapters on the origins of English, German, Dutch, and the Germanic language family as a whole illustrate how the history of the sounds of these languages provide a key that unlocks the secret of their genesis: speakers of Latin, Celtic and Balto-Finnic switched to speaking Germanic and in the process introduced a 'foreign accent' that caught on and spread at the expense of types of Germanic that were not affected by foreign influence. The book is aimed at linguists, historians, archaeologists and anyone who is interested in what languages can tell us about the origins of their speakers.

The Germanic language family ranges from national languages with standardized varieties, including German, Dutch and Danish, to minority languages with relatively few speakers, such as Frisian, Yiddish and Pennsylvania German. Written by internationally renowned experts of Germanic linguistics, this Handbook provides a detailed overview and analysis of the structure of modern Germanic languages and dialects. Organized thematically, it addresses key topics in the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of standard and nonstandard varieties of Germanic languages from a comparative perspective. It also includes chapters on second language acquisition, heritage and minority languages, pidgins, and urban vernaculars. The first comprehensive survey of this vast topic, the Handbook is a vital resource for students and researchers investigating the Germanic family of languages and dialects.

Fulk’s Comparative Grammar offers an overview of and bibliographical guide to the study of the phonology and the inflectional morphology of the earliest Germanic languages, with particular attention to Gothic, Old Norse / Icelandic, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German, along with some attention to the more sparsely attested languages. The sounds and inflections of the oldest Germanic languages are compared, with a view to reconstructing the forms they took in Proto-Germanic and comparing those reconstructed forms with what is known of the Indo-European protolanguage. Students will find the book an informative introduction and a bibliographically instructive point of departure for intensive research in the numerous issues that remain profoundly contested in early Germanic language history.

This volume contains revised and, in some cases, extended versions of twelve of the fourteen lectures read at the conference on “Early Germanic Languages in Contact” held at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense on 22-23 August 2013 – with a paper and a review article added at the end on themes pertaining to the aim and scope of the symposium. All papers cover central aspects of the early contact between Germanic and some of its Indo-European and non-Indo-European linguistic neighbours; and, in certain cases, aspects involving internal Germanic language contact.

The series Studia Linguistica Germanica, founded in 1968 by Ludwig Erich Schmitt and Stefan Sonderegger, is one of the standard publication organs for German Linguistics. The series aims to cover the whole spectrum of the subject, while concentrating on questions relating to language history and the history of linguistic ideas. It includes works on the historical grammar and semantics of German, on the relationship of language and culture, on the history of language theory, on dialectology, on lexicology / lexicography, text linguisticsand on the location of German in the European linguistic context.

Focusing on the sociolinguistic history of Germanic languages, the current volume challenges the traditional teleological approach of language historiography. The 30 contributions present alternative histories of ten ‘big’ as well as ‘small’ Germanic languages and varieties in the last 300 years. Topics covered in this book include language variation and change and the politics of language contact and choice, seen against the background of standardization processes of written and oral text genres and from the viewpoint of larger sections of the population.

This book presents new empirical findings about Germanic heritage varieties spoken in North America: Dutch, German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, West Frisian and Yiddish, and varieties of English spoken both by heritage speakers and in communities after language shift. The volume focuses on three critical issues underlying the notion of ‘heritage language’: acquisition, attrition and change. The book offers theoretically-informed discussions of heritage language processes across phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics and the lexicon, in addition to work on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and contact settings. With this, the volume also includes a variety of frameworks and approaches, synchronic and diachronic. Most European Germanic languages share some central linguistic features, such as V2, gender and agreement in the nominal system, and verb inflection. As minority languages faced with a majority language like English, similarities and differences emerge in patterns of variation and change in these heritage languages. These empirical findings shed new light on mechanisms and processes.