The Germanic Languages

Routledge Language Family

by Ekkehard König (Editor), Johan van der Auwera (Editor)

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

Genres: Linguistics, Language

648 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not qualified to read this book, as I do not even understand my own language well enough to grasp the finer points of the grammar exposition contained herein. However, I gave it a hearty skim and encountered many an interesting tidbit. It's clearly excellent, even if I can't appreciate exactly how excellent.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This here 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.

[Stebbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprehensive and yet accessible, The Germanic Languages is a highly readable account of the historical, phonological and morphosyntactical structures of the extant Germanic languages by a cast of some of the most eminent scholars of Germanic philology today.