Although German-language islands, or Sprachinseln, have a long standing tradition of study, it is not until recent times (see, for example, Fuller 2006, Huffines 1994, Salmons 1994) that one sees language island studies step away from a mainly sociolinguistic focus and incorporate theoretical frameworks. The volume being reviewed here is a collection of sixteen articles grounded in generative and structural perspectives encompassing a variety of German-language islands in North and South America and Europe. The articles are arranged in six sections: Section 1 “Phonetics and phonology,” section 2 “Morphology and lexical studies,” section 3 “Syntax I—verb clusters,” section 4 “Syntax II—the syntax of Cimbrian German,” section 5 “Syntax III—the syntax of Pennsylvania German,” and section 6 “Pragmatics and conversation analysis.” A list of abbreviations and contributors is found at the beginning of the volume, and a subject index is found at the end, allowing easy identification of the diverse topics covered in this book. As the editor states in the book’s introduction: “The purpose of this volume is to expose various related research communities to under-researched aspects of these Sprachinsel languages as well as to provide new perspectives on long-standing debates” (p. 8). With the diverse topics handled in this volume, the book achieves its aim to unveil to the reader many new perspectives using a variety of theoretical frameworks.

The first section, consisting of two articles, explores German in Wisconsin and Mòcheno German spoken in Trentino, Italy. Although both are phonological studies that involve data from two speakers of the respective varieties of German, the two diverge considerably as to areas examined. Renee Remy’s “On final laryngeal distinctions in Wisconsin Standard German” provides a clear picture of the mutual influence of Wisconsin German on Wisconsin English and Wisconsin English on Wisconsin German, particularly with respect to final laryngeal neutral-ization. Birgit Alber’s “Past participles in Mòcheno: Allomorphy, alignment, and the distribution of obstruents” demonstrates that an analysis of past participle formation in Mòcheno in terms of optimal-ization is desirable. Both studies provide examples of two very different ways of investigating the phonological features of two distinct language islands (that is, acoustic analysis in Remy’s paper and Optimality Theory in Alber’s paper), but both do so using data from spoken language.

Section 2 is composed of four articles presenting morphological and lexical studies on German-language islands in the United States. One theme that recurs throughout three of the four articles follows what Putnam refers to in the introduction as a “call to arms” (p. 4), as these studies present interesting preliminary findings and identify the need for further work. The articles also offer rich typological perspectives in the context of the data presented, such as Annemarie Toebosch’s “Plaut-dietsch gender: Between Dutch and German.” She compares gender development in Henderson Plautdietsch alongside Dutch and German and finds that certain varieties of Plautdietsch exhibit gender attrition in their gender systems, as well as a weakening in the arbitrary gender system leading to semanticization.

Michael T. Putnam’s “Anaphors in contact: The distribution of intensifiers and reflexives in Amana German” represents the second study in this book framed in Optimality Theory. He demonstrates that developments in Amana German’s intensifier and reflexive inventory strongly resemble such developments in Dutch and English (as opposed to German). In this section, one also finds a diachronic study of the development, over the last 40 years, of Texas German lexical items in Hans C. Boas & Marc Pierce’s “Lexical developments in Texas Ger-man.” They reveal that the lexicon of Texas German has, in fact, not experienced any significant changes in the last four decades. Richard Page’s “Gender assignment of English loanwords in Pennsylvania German: Is there a feminine tendency?” provides a brief but insightful study that indicates that data from Pennsylvania German reveal no statis-tical evidence for a feminine tendency in gender assignment. Page also shows that the gender assignment rules differ between Standard German and Pennsylvania German, which is attributable to apocope in Pennsyl-vania German.

Section 3 introduces the topic dealt with most heavily in this book—syntax—and consists of two articles on verb clusters. Mark Louden’s “Synchrony and diachrony of verb clusters in Pennsylvania Dutch” offers a descriptive presentation of verb clusters in Pennsylvania German from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, whereas Göz Kaufmann’s “Looking for order in chaos: Standard convergence and divergence in Mennonite Low German” provides a typological investi-gation of five linguistic phenomena in six Mennonite colonies. Two of the phenomena investigated relate to verb clusters, tying it in with the section’s overall theme.

In addition to Kaufmann’s revealing results, the study may have been enhanced with a discussion of potential internal causes (rather than convergence) for one of the phenomena explored, that is, the variation in the masculine definite article serving as a direct object. Rosenberg (2005:233) argues that case reduction in German-language islands is more likely internally motivated and does not result from convergence. This contrasts with a piece of Göz’s investigation, where he views the variation in masculine definite articles that function as direct objects as resulting from possible influence of neighboring Mennonite Low Ger-man dialects. As Werner Abraham’s study demonstrates in section 4, internal factors cannot be ruled out when it comes to changes found in Sprachinsel languages, as external influences are not always the cause.

Section 4 contains four articles covering various syntactic issues specific to Cimbrian German. Werner Abraham’s “Spoken syntax in Cimbrian of the linguistic islands in Northern Italy—and what they (do not) betray about language universals and change under areal contact with Italo-Romance” demonstrates that borrowing is not a factor in the change that Cimbrian German has undergone; rather, the change is due to internal factors. Andrea Padovan’s “Diachronic clues to grammatical-ization phenomena in the Cimbrian CP” offers insight into the comple-mentizer ke, an Italian loanword. It shows that the expansion and reanalysis of the loanword ke within the Cimbrian complementizer layer is not random; instead, this process has followed a precise hierarchy from top to bottom. Günther Grewendorf & Cecilia Poletto’s “Hidden verb second: The case of Cimbrian” addresses the left periphery of Cimbrian and demonstrates that Cimbrian can still be classified as a V2 language. They end their study by suggesting future research avenues for investi-gating various syntactic features.

Ermenegildo Bidese’s “Revisiting the Wackernagelposition: The evolution of the Cimbrian pronominal system” shows that the syntax of Cimbrian moved closer to that of Romance but did not fully converge due to restrictions imposed by Germanic syntax. Bidese’s article repre-sents the one outlier in this volume in the sense that the data were not taken from contemporary, spoken sources but rather from older, written sources, providing a diachronic account of Cimbrian syntax. Considering that the articles in this collection base their results primarily on spoken language, it would be interesting for future research to see what Bidese’s analysis would yield in the context of current spoken Cimbrian.

The fifth section includes two articles investigating syntactic features in Pennsylvania German and concludes the topics on syntax. Gesche Westphal Fitch’s “Changes in frequency as a measure of language change: Extraposition in Pennsylvania German” presents an informative typological comparison of the rate of extraposition of adverbials among Pennsylvania German, Standard German, and Palatinate dialects. Her study demonstrates that the three dialect groups differ significantly in this regard, but she submits the possibility that extraposition frequency in Pennsylvania German may be a result of pre-existing tendencies in Palatinate dialects. Kersti Börjars & Kate Burridge’s “From preposition to purposive to infinitival marker: The Pennsylvania German fer … zu construction” argues that the loss of the original infinitival marker zu and the subsequent rise of the infinitival fer is unique in Pennsylvania German in that it is not due to reanalysis, as is often claimed cross-linguistically.

Section 6 concludes the book with two articles on pragmatics and conversation analysis. Emma Betz’s “Word choice, turn construction, and topic management in German conversation: Adverbs that are sen-sitive to interactional positioning” utilizes conversation analysis to investigate lexical features of Siebenbürger Sächsisch, a Sprachinseln language in Romania. Her study illuminates the use of the lexical items ientz(t) and ientzter as a turn constructional unit or as a means to mark a turn as complete or incomplete. Hunter Weilbacher’s “Texas German discourse pragmatics: A preliminary study of the English-origin dis-course markers of course, see, and now“ adds to the literature on Texas German by examining the role of English pragmatic discourse markers in Texas German. Weilbacher’s work highlights the difficulty in distin-guishing between borrowing and code-switching (particularly, as it relates to their definitions in the literature), and follows the book’s overall theme in encouraging further work.

It is worth mentioning that with the exception of Pennsylvania German and certain varieties of Mennonite Low German, the remaining Sprachinseln studied in this volume appear to be in the Assimilations-phase (assimilation phase) of a speech island’s life, as defined by Mattheier (2003). This is the stage where language decay prevails, ultimately leading to the death of the language island. The fact that these languages are in this advanced stage means that these particular studies afford insight into certain language varieties that may not be in existence in the near future. It, thus, underscores Putnam’s urging in the intro-duction to continue to study these languages before more opportunities are lost.

For any person interested in seeing theoretical issues presented alongside a wealth of data, this book provides ample examples that not only serve as a model for subsequent work but also raise many inter-esting questions that remain to be explored in future studies. The abundance of studies dealing with syntax allow anyone interested in syntactic analysis the opportunity to see a wide array of applications and opportunities for further research in this area.

The editor has taken an extremely diverse set of papers and suc-cessfully organized them into coherent themes. As a whole, this book demonstrates that theoretical issues can be evaluated from a wide range of generative and structural perspectives. It is of particular relevance to anyone interested in typological studies, contact linguistics, language death and attrition, and of course those studying language islands. With such a diverse collection of informative studies conducted in a variety of frameworks, this book significantly advances our understanding of not only Germanic languages, but also linguistics in general.