The Germanic Languages (Routledge Language Familydescriptions)

An excellent reference for both modern and historical Germanic linguists. A concise history and grammar for each of the historical and modern languages is provided. Even includes some of the more obscure languages and dialects (such as Pennsylvania Dutch(German) and the German creoles, which are often ignored.

THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES is an entry in Routledge's Language Family Descriptions series that gives brief grammatical overviews of the main languages in this family, ancient and modern. The languages covered here are Gothic, Old Norse and Middle Scandinavian, Old and Middle Continental West Germanic, Old and Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Yiddish, Pennsylvania German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, English, and finally Germanic creoles.

Like other entries in this series, the grammar, population, and lexis of each language is treated. It is nice to see so many descriptions of ancient languages and emphasis on historical linguistics. The chapter on Gothic, which attempts to use the language to reconstruct Proto-Germanic was written by Winfred Lehmann, one of the greatest comparative Indo-European linguists of the 20th century and a keen investigator of the Germanic branch. Among the entries on modern languages, the careful attention to tones in the chapters on Norwegian and Swedish make this a useful resource. The book also includes many maps to show geographic divisions of languages and their dialects.

My only real complaint about the book is that it does not provide a sample text in the language with grammatical explication at the end of each chapter like, for example, Routledge's survey of the Uralic languages. It also doesn't treat several minority languages like Luxembourgish or Swiss German, seeing them as dialects in a grander scheme.

This book is very complete, as there are twelve long chapters about the corresponding most important Germanic languages spoken today, as well as other chapters about Proto-Germanic, Gothic, Old English, Old German-Dutch and Old Norse. However I have found it very difficult to read as I'm not an expert linguist. Instead of comparing each language with the others, as I'd have desired, it just enumerates and details every single peculiarity of the grammars, including phonology, morphosyntactic aspects and lexis.

This book is very typical in its study on the three common divisions of the Germanic Languages (East, West and North), ancient and modern. Among these divisions is as follows: Gothic (which is concentrated heavily on, being the only "Eastern" Germanic language), Old and Middle English as well as Modern English, Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Yiddish, Pennsylvania German, Dutch, Afrikaans and Frisian. Each chapter is devoted to one or the other of the languages and goes into great detail on History, Phonology, Present-day usage, Morphology, Developments, Systems, Structure and some Grammar. Mind you, this is not a language course or even a brief for the beginner who wishes to learn vocabulary or anything like that, it is simply a very forward explanation on History Developments and their overall play and role in society today and before.

The Germanic Languages is a very useful book to the linguistic intermediate beginner. I recommend it to anyone whose heart lies in Scandinavian Language and culture, for it presents a very foundational knowledge sourse that is fundamental to all in that course of study.
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