Part of a larger series published by Cambridge University Press that offers general accounts of the major language families of the world, this book aims to provide a representative sketch of the Germanic languages. Germanic—one of the largest subgroups 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 (e.g., Gothic). This book abstracts away from the social, geographical, cultural, and temporal contexts of this language family with the goal of examining this particular language family's assemblages of grammatical units, rule systems, and constructions. The primary intended audience of this book is therefore those who are interested in how the Germanic languages are put together, what they have in common in terms of their linguistic organization, and how they differ from each other structurally. The author avoids the often successful self-contained descriptions of individual languages in favor of a discussion and description of structures and grammatical units. The rationale for such a shift in data presentation is twofold: First, presenting descriptions of individual languages within a particular family throughout would be highly repetitive, and, second, the focus on structural commonalities and how they differ paradigmatically falls out from the author's adherence to Chomsky's (Reference Chomsky1981) principles-and-parameters view of human language knowledge.

The organization of natural language data provided makes this book an easily accessible resource for language learners and instructors. Numerous examples from both synchronic and diachronic Germanic languages present a representative sample of the structure of and variation found within the Germanic languages. The primary audience of this book will most likely be students and instructors interested in language history, language variation, and linguistic theory. This work should receive a high volume of readership and will be frequently consulted, as it is a thorough treatment of the structure of Germanic languages past and present.