Bruno Schweizer’s 1953 work intends to provide a synchronic description of the grammar of all Cimbrian dialects. “Cimbrian” refers to several varieties of Southern Bavarian spoken in speech islands in northeastern Italy. It was the language of Bavarian settlers who moved to an un-inhabited region in the Alps of present-day Italy, probably at the beginning of the 13th century. By the end of the 16th century, over twenty speech islands existed in an area of about 260 square kilometers, surrounded by communities speaking Romance regional dialects.

The vast amount of linguistic data presented in the book makes it a valuable research tool in Germanic linguistics. The material was col-lected by the author during multiple trips to the area between 1933 and 1943. It was supplemented with other written sources (catechisms, stories, grammars, dictionaries, and previous studies) from about twenty different locations dating back to as early as the 17th century. Since language shift occurred in most of the surveyed communities over the course of the 20th century, Schweizer’s work presents material that would have otherwise been lost. As such, it can be a starting point to investigate language change in different varieties of Cimbrian.

Several studies focused on a few Cimbrian varieties in the 19th and 20th century, but Schweizer’s objective to compare all the dialects is unique. In addition, this work contains a large amount of original mater-ial collected onsite from native speakers, as opposed to Kranzmayer’s Laut- und Flexionslehre der deutschen zimbrischen Mundart (1981), which emerged from interviews that Kranzmayer conducted with native speakers but outside the Cimbrian speaking area. During and after WW1, Kanzmayer visited prisoner of war camps, deportee camps, and military hospitals in northwest and southern Austria to collect his data. Since these camps were located outside the Cimbrian speaking area, I assume that a considerable portion of the camp population spoke a variety of Bavarian other than Cimbrian. The contact with these related varieties may have affected the language of the Cimbrian speakers interviewed by Kranzmayer.

The main limit of Schweizer’s work, however, is what the editor of the book calls the “Langobardian thesis.” According to this theory, Cim-brian stems from Lombardic, and Cimbrian speakers are the descendants of the Lombard linguistic and cultural heritage (p. 661). This approach pervades the entire book and, when discussing forms of uncertain origin, Schweizer claims that they are related to Lombardic or Gothic, instead of investigating the connection with more closely related dialects of the Old High German period. Several studies (Kranzmayer 1960, 1981; Hornung 1984; Tyroller 2003; and Bidese 2004) have located the Cimbrian speakers’ place of origin in West Tyrol and have shown that the Lango-bardian thesis cannot be supported.

Schweizer created his own method of transcription to represent even the finest phonological differences, like “shaded, dull sounds.” He de-scribed his method in a relatively short paragraph, but he apparently refined it throughout his work, and reoccurring forms are at times transcribed differently. For this reason, transcriptions are at times reader unfriendly. In addition, this inconsistency raises the question whether different transcriptions reflect actual variation or result from the author’s occasional imprecision. Also, the lack of a list of abbreviations used in the book requires a guessing effort from the reader.

The book begins with a ten-page introduction by James R. Dow explaining the circumstances that led to its publication in 2008, over fifty years after its completion. The result of Schweizer’s work was his doctoral dissertation, which he submitted for his Habilitation four times between 1937 and 1951, only to see it rejected every time, primarily due to the Langobardian thesis. After the last rejection, the publishing company evaluated the work and recommended some changes, but Schweizer then devoted his attention to the Bavarian Language Atlas, and the Cimbrian grammar was ultimately published in 2008, after James Dow’s patient editing work.

The book is divided into five volumes that discuss vowels, con-sonants, inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, and syntax. The first volume presents, in order, stressed and unstressed syllables in initial, medial, and final position. For the treatment of stressed syllables, the author’s starting points are Germanic vowels, diphthongs, and their reflexes in every surveyed Cimbrian dialect. The description is supported by tables listing lexical items as they appear in each village, and their New High German equivalent. The diversity of sources does allow for every word to be attested in every dialect, and in some cases Schweizer prefers not to include data if they appear to be inconsistent or unreliable.

The second volume discusses consonants. The author presents every Germanic consonant or consonant cluster and their reflexes in Cimbrian. Here Schweizer’s thesis that failed to recognize Cimbrian as a Bavarian dialect surfaces: The author suggests that forms showing a correspon-dence with Bavarian may be examples of “Einfluss der Österreichischen Kanzleisprache” [influence of the Austrian chancellery language which was the official language for government documents], p. 258), or “Bavarismen, die aus der Rittersprache als ‘fein’ übernommen wurden” [Bavarian forms from the knight culture that were adopted as “elegant”], p. 258. In many instances, Schweizer provides examples of sound changes as evidence to support the Lombardic origin. One example is Germanic ð, which in Bavarian shifted to d before the eighth century. The shift occurred in the second half of the eighth century in Alemannic and in the ninth century in Upper Franconian. ð remained unshifted in Lombardic until the eighth century. According to Schweizer, the pre-sence of ð in Cimbrian is an example of the relation between Cimbrian and Lombardic (p. 291). Schweizer also detected Romance influence on Cimbrian phonology. One example is Romance v, which has no cor-responding sound in Germanic and was replaced in Cimbrian with w. He also gives insight into sound changes that were in progress at the beginning of the 20th century and are now completed; for example, the shift from j to g in word-initial position, currently attested in a variety of Cimbrian (Morandi 2008).

The third volume describes nominal and verbal inflectional morphology. Schweizer presents the different noun classes across Cim-brian dialects. As for phonology, he finds great variation across the dialects. The nominal morphology section begins with tables of every noun class with examples of lexical items as they appear in every dialect. In case of multiple forms, Schweizer discusses possible reasons for variation. He also observes the loss of the genitive case in all dialects, and a tendency for the nominative to replace the accusative. When dis-cussing personal pronouns, Schweizer draws the attention of the reader to clitics and the different cliticization possibilities. Cimbrian allows for the combination of up to three clitics, even though rarely. In the section dedicated to verbal morphology, Schweizer describes present indicative endings and brings attention to the 3rd person plural, which in two areas had still preserved the Old High German inflection -ent. Tables for moods and tenses used in Cimbrian further display verb conjugations for all verb classes in several locations.

The fourth volume describes word formation. This volume was meant to become a global Cimbrian dictionary containing all the material available at the time. The result, however, is a collection of 400 concepts expressed in Cimbrian with 2000 definitions. It was not meant to be an exhaustive collection. Schweizer often reminds the reader that his goal was to show how limited the knowledge about Cimbrian dialects was at the time and how much further research was needed. The volume begins with an alphabetical list of lexical items in Standard German and their equivalents in five Cimbrian areas. Schweizer also lists groups of nouns that underwent gender switch. The largest group includes nouns that switched from feminine and neuter to masculine. Cases of switch from masculine and neuter to feminine, and from masculine and feminine to neuter are also attested, although less commonly. Following the list, Schweizer also created an alphabetical table with all the nouns that had undergone gender switch. They are divided into groups based on the location where they were attested and the type of gender switch.

A third section of this volume deals with derivational morphology and presents several derivational suffixes found in the different towns. This section provides insight into the variation of Cimbrian from town to town: It shows which suffixes and morphemes were still productive at that time and which were showing signs of decay. Some suffixes only occurred in relic forms in one town, and had completely disappeared elsewhere.

The fifth volume describes Cimbrian syntax. Schweizer’s objective here is to let the examples speak for themselves and limit explanatory discussions to what he sees as a deviation from the norm, which for him is New High German. Schweizer initially explains the meaning of the various content and function words (subject, predicate, attribute) and their placement in a sentence. He then points out that the contact of Germanic and Romance varieties allowed for the existence of equivalent structures, which at his time occurred in alternation. He observes that just as in the case of the surrounding Romance varieties Cimbrian allows for subject omission.

Schweizer also presents the different possibilities for verb placement in Cimbrian as opposed to New High German, in various sentence types, indicating pragmatic focus as the responsible factor for verb placement in non-ordinary positions. He observes that in Cimbrian subordinate clauses, the finite verb does not occupy the final position. Schweizer explains topicalization of any sentence component, including the verb, as an emphasis-conveying strategy. In this volume, he also discusses un-stressed pronouns, which are often encliticized to verb forms, even when the stressed pronoun is present. The use of enclitic forms on verbs seems to have the redundant function of an additional inflection. This volume only marginally deals with sentence structure and presents types of coordination, subordination, and the conjunctions used to combine coordinate versus subordinate clauses.

This book meets the expectations suggested by the title and presents a wealth of examples to describe the grammar of Cimbrian dialects. In addition to furnishing the reader with data that would otherwise be lost, Schweizer raises questions by indicating those areas of the language that demand further research. Although the material is not always cohesively organized, this book is a unique work in its intent to survey all Cimbrian dialects for the number of examples it makes available, and in providing original data to further investigate topics in Germanic linguistics and dialectology.