This edited volume comprises sixteen original contributions, each discussing both diachronically and synchronically the standardization of a language of Germanic origin. In a few cases, a number of languages are treated together—English-lexified Caribbean creoles, Pacific creoles, and the languages designated as “Norwegian.” This has resulted in a fascinating collection for anyone interested in Germanic linguistics and a superb reference book for anyone working on language planning, regardless of whether they wish to follow up one or more languages or read the entire work for contrastive purposes.

The sixteen individual chapters comprise a concise explanation of the issues, a potted history, and all the essential facts. They record the key players for each language, those who wrote the first dictionaries, grammars, and pronunciation guides, some of which were used but not printed, and those who refined the codification over time. They also record the struggles for particular orthographic principles, for particular varieties or a greater choice of norms, for greater status, and/or for greater autonomy.

The volume opens with an introduction by the editors, setting the context for the individual studies, canvassing the main issues for comparison and outlining the theoretical model. The individual language contributions are followed by a closing chapter, again by the editors, suggesting future research directions on language standardization.

This volume follows the lead of Kloss's monumental Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800 (1978), but unlike Kloss's volume, limited to the period after 1800, the one under review goes back to the earliest times as well as taking on board the most contemporary works on each language. In fact, most chapters end with a section on most recent developments in the language. All the authors are scholars who have themselves made contributions to the study of the standardization of the language they are writing about and know the field thoroughly. Generally, they are able to present it succinctly to a specialist audience without knowledge of the language, although there are a few chapters where the amount of detail makes reading heavy going for the newcomer to the language.

The contributions are: Afrikaans (Paul Roberge), Caribbean Creoles (Hubert Devonish), Danish (Tore Kristiansen), Dutch (Ronald Willemyns), English (Terttu Nevalainen), Faroese (Zakaris Svabo Hansen, Jógvan í Lon Jacobsen, and Eivind Weyhe), (West) Frisian (Eric Hoekstra), German (Klaus Mattheier), Icelandic (Kristján Árnason), Low German (Nils Langer), Letzebuergesch (Peter Gilles and Claudine Moulin), Norwegian (Ernst Håkon Jahr), Pacific Pidgins and Creoles (Peter Mühlhäusler), Scots (Marina Dossena), Swedish (Ulf Teleman), Yiddish (Rakhmiel Peltz).

The language-specific chapters are presented alphabetically. (This, I assume, is to avoid a classification according to closeness of relationship or similarity of standardization process.) I first wondered if this was in conflict with the concept of covering an entire language family when it would also have been possible to examine standardization in, say, the languages of northern and western or central Europe. But as it turns out, different languages have lent themselves to different approaches despite closer linguistic relationship. For instance, the Caribbean Creole chapter focuses on evolution and the Pacific one on ecological aspects. The Icelandic chapter emphasizes written texts that have been handed down (and the origins of Icelandic), while the Faroese one, which is about a language with mainly an oral tradition, focuses on recent institutional standardization efforts.

Owing to the size and breadth of the volume, it will not be possible to go into detail on each chapter, so I will discuss more general (interlingual) issues. But I cannot resist disagreeing with Mattheier (p. 239) that it was only with the fall of the wall that the pluricentricity debate concentrated on variation between German in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland!

The volume offers a comparative introduction to the “standardization histories” of the Germanic languages as each chapter follows Haugen's (1966a, 1966b, 1972) four-step model (norm selection, codification, elaboration, acceptance [or implementation]—where appropriate the order has been changed). The general success of the model in providing this comparative dimension demonstrates its effectiveness, but several authors are able to indicate shortcomings.

The introduction begins with Jespersen's (1925) statement describing the emergence of great national common (standard) languages as the “greatest evolution of language.” This is the theme of the book, which is given cohesion by a useful typology introduced by the editors. They differentiate between “mature” (fully codified), “incipient standards” (languages with partial and ongoing standardization, such as Frisian, Scots, Letzebuergesch, Yiddish), and “incipient standard languages” (Jamaican, Pitcairn, and Norfolk Creoles) as well as one language (Low German) with an absence of standardization even (perhaps not surprisingly) during a lingua franca phase. They distinguish “innovative languages” such as Afrikaans, Bokmål, and Ny Norsk (which were developed in the 19th century), from “traditional languages” originating from medieval standards (such as Swedish and Icelandic), “big” and “small” languages, and between those with only L1 speakers (for example, Icelandic, Faroese) and those with many L2 speakers (for example, English, the creoles but also Letzeburgesch). Finally, they make the distinction between colonial languages (such as Afrikaans) and post-colonial ones (such as the creoles).

I am most impressed by the wealth of information on each language. This will provide new perspectives as well as consolidate existing knowledge on languages such as English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Swedish and also supply information on the less familiar languages such as Faroese, Letzebuergesch, Yiddish, and the two Norwegian languages. In each case, all the important works on codification of all aspects of the language are referred to and their importance for the ongoing standard is evaluated.

It is in the “Recent Developments” that particular great innovation and ingenuity is shown. There is a vast array of issues in status planning, new codices, destandardization, status demotion with the intrusion of English, English borrowing, new functions (such as education [Scots], pop music, politics [Frisian]), the influence of peer group exceeding that of the elders, the new media culture of “youthfulness, spontaneity and naturalness” (Teleman, p. 426), and the competing standards of school and the media. It is observed in numerous languages that the earlier opening up of new domains for the national language to replace Latin or a colonial language has recently been counteracted by domain loss through the penetration of English into academic fields, business, and information technology internally as well as externally.

Among the recurrent issues in the book are:

1. Competing regional or national varieties (for example, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Yiddish, Caribbean creoles) and competing social varieties (for example, Danish, Swedish) as norms.
2. Donor language in contact situations (Danish, Letzebuergesch, Yiddish, the latter involving “redoing corpus planning”).
3. Competition between two ways of standardizing the written language based on tradition, or based on current or recent phoneme-grapheme relations (for example, Dutch, Swedish, but not English or in Danish, where great phoneme-grapheme differences kept the distance from Swedish or Norwegian).
4. Continuity versus discontinuity (for example, Frisian, Icelandic).
5. Pluricentricity (Dutch, German; but not mentioned for Swedish).
6. Destandardization (for example, German [due to language change and ambiguous regional standard], Dutch [due to dialect loss], disappearance of narrow standard).
7. Variable importance of language academies (Afrikaans) and language movements (Flemish, Faroese), but only limited interest in an academy for English.
8. The role of the chancery, the invention of the printing press and the Reformation (even ultimately in Catholic areas) (for example, German, Swedish and Dutch, including the function of the Statenbijbel in checking the north-south balance and similar incidental effects of the Luther Bible).
9. The development of specialized terminology (Afrikaans, Faroese, Scots, Yiddish).

Other issues that the book contributes to are the influence of educated elites, language and identity, and government control in language.

This shows that the issues are not distributed according to relatedness of language. Generally there appears to be developing a distrust of codifiers and prescriptions. The authors are tolerant of variation, which appears to be tipping the balance away from standards.

There are strengths and weaknesses in the final chapter. It is devoted mainly to future research directions in the field and refers to models or ideas that are initiated in one or another language and probably not accessible to people working on other languages. However, there is no inventory (reflecting the introduction), drawing together the issues occurring for which language and how. This is, in my opinion, all the more necessary as there is no cross-referencing between the chapters, a task that would have been too daunting to be worthwhile.

This is a dense, informative, and very satisfying book, and one that is very enjoyable to read.