The term Cimbrian refers to a German variety spoken nowadays only in the small alpine enclave of Lusern (Italian: Luserna) in the province of Trento in northeast Italy. In the past, Cimbrian was spoken throughout a much larger territory, including almost the entire mountainous areas of the provinces of Verona and Vicenza in the region of Veneto (see Bidese Reference Bidese and Stolz2004). From the very beginning, the philological tradition within German dialectological studies, particularly the so-called Deutsche Sprachinsel-forschung (research on German “linguistic islands”), showed a great interest in this isolated German dialect. Johann Andreas Schmeller (1785–1852), one of the founders of dialectology, conducted two field-work expeditions in the Cimbrian territories—in 1833 and 1844—producing two fundamentally important studies (see Schmeller Reference Bayer1838 and Reference Benincà1855).

Since the end of the 1990s, a new research interest in Cimbrian within the approach of the generative Variational Linguistics has been gaining ground.Footnote ¹ On the one hand, this research has been focusing on the synchronic variation in Cimbrian in comparison to Standard German and Romance as well as to other German “linguistic islands” (see, among others, Poletto & Tomaselli Reference Poletto, Tomaselli and Marcato2000, Reference Poletto, Barbiers, Cornips and Van der Kleij2002). On the other hand, it has been exploring the diachronic evolution of Cimbrian as a minority language outside of the main German-speaking area that is also in contact with North-Italian dialects (see Bidese & Tomaselli Reference Bidese and Tomaselli2007, Bidese Reference Bidese2008). Kolmer's present work on the pronominal forms in the Cimbrian of Lusern fits into this new research domain, dealing specifically with the question of contact-induced grammatical change (p. 13).Footnote ²

With respect to the theoretical understanding of language contact, Kolmer embraces Sasses’ (Reference Sasse and Brenzinger1992:61) isomorphism hypothesis, which predicts that over a long period of time, the grammars of two languages in contact would converge. No grammatical aspect would remain unaffected; the triggers are long-term collective bilingualism and heavy lexical borrowing. This is precisely the situation in Lusern. For this reason, Kolmer puts forward the following hypothesis: Grammatical change in the Cimbrian of Lusern can be explained as a development toward a greater conformity with the model languages, that is, the surrounding northern Italian dialects (p. 19).

Respecting the heuristics, Kolmer's investigation is based on a vast corpus of new linguistic data collected by the author during interviews with nine informants of different ages, as well as on Bacher's (Reference Bacher1905) traditional Cimbrian stories. Further data have been collected by means of translation tasks on the basis of a standardized questionnaire.

The study consists of five chapters. The first two deal with the fundamental research in language contact, and with the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic situation in Lusern. The third chapter reconstructs the morphological and syntactic properties of Cimbrian pronominal forms. Building on this, chapter 4 considers the function of pronominal clitics as possible agreement markers, whereas chapter 5 addresses the question of “… ob sich im Cimbro ein Wandel von einem (speziellen) second position clitic-System zu einem verbal clitic-System vollzieht” (p. 18).Footnote ³ The book is concluded with a summary of the results, two tables of the corresponding Cimbrian and Middle-High-German phonemes, a list of the informants, and a bibliography.

As far as the main result of Kolmer's investigation is concerned, it can be summarized as follows: With respect to the morphology of the Cimbrian pronominal forms, structures that emerged from contact with the Romance varieties are limited in Cimbrian (p. 227). An entirely different picture arises when the influence on the syntax is taken into account. In this domain of grammar, the impact of the model language is assumed to play a fundamental role for the following reasons.

First, it can be observed that “[a]nders als in Dialekten im ge-schlossenen deutschen Sprachraum klitisieren unbetonte Pronomen nicht nur an finite, sondern auch an infinite Verbformen” (p. 228).Footnote ⁴ Second, an increasing number of types of embedded clauses seem to allow the structure of a matrix clause, which suggests the loss of the well-known German(ic) asymmetry between root and embedded clauses. For example, this is the case of subordinate clauses introduced by the declarative complementizer ke as well as by the causal complementizer umbrómm. This pattern can also be found in some embedded interrogatives. In all these contexts, the object pronouns and other weak elements appear in postverbal position—as in the matrix clause—and are not clitized onto the complementizer.

Finally, an initial change in the Cimbrian agreement system can be detected (p. 229). Based on the three-way distinction proposed by Siewierska (Reference Bidese and Stolz1999)—anaphoric, ambiguous, and grammatical—Kolmer classifies the Cimbrian agreement system as primarily grammatical. Nevertheless, it is possible to find contexts in which the evolution of subject clitics to bounded morphemes ought to be expected (p. 229). Such a development of the subject clitics into agreement markers (which, in Siewierska's terms, corresponds to a transition from a grammatical agreement system to an ambiguous one) is possible because of the position of the subject clitics as enclitic to the finite verb. Kolmer proposes that what triggers this grammatical change is the subject focus strategy in the northern Italian dialects that is being integrated into the Cimbrian system.

Kolmer's study stands out not only because of its strong empirical foundation but also because of its convincing analysis. Particularly worthy of mention are the morphonological reconstruction of the pronominal forms (sections 3.1–3.3) as well as the treatment of the syntactic structures of topic and focus (sections 4.2 and 4.3). From my point of view, however, what remains not entirely convincing is the overall conclusion of the study that explains changes in Cimbrian syntax through the direct influence of the northern Italian varieties. As a matter of fact, the author herself argues that with regards to the function of subject clitics, structural similarities can be detected between Cimbrian and the Romance varieties, and not the varieties of the areas immediately surrounding the Cimbrian enclave, as one might expect. For example, Cimbrian shares structural features with the Raeto-Romance varieties (pp. 194–197), which, crucially, show the V2 phenomenon (see Poletto Reference Poletto, Barbiers, Cornips and Van der Kleij2002). This seems to suggest that rather than being determined by language contact, the diachrony of Cimbrian syntax follows internal patterns.

At the same time, the study deals with numerous syntactic phenomena for which no counterparts can be found in today's surrounding Romance varieties, such as the inversion of the pronominal subject in declarative root clauses (p. 123) or the root versus embedded asymmetry (p. 131). Kolmer treats the embedded clauses that reproduce root structures and thus show no German(ic) asymmetry as a clear sign of contact-induced loss of the phenomenon. Yet, as the author herself states (p. 137), the Cimbrian symmetry between root and embedded clauses clearly exhibits internal properties that have no counterparts in the surrounding Romance varieties. As a matter of fact, in Cimbrian the lack of the asymmetry is crucially connected with a class of complementizers that trigger a root-like word order and with an intervening contrastive focus position that prevents the object pronouns from encliticizing onto the complementizer.

As for the above-mentioned pronominal subject inversion, it is worth noting that it is possible even in embedded clauses with root-like word order (pp. 132–133). To the best of my knowledge, such a structure never occurs in the surrounding contact languages; it is reminiscent of the well-known embedded V2 phenomenon, which is characteristic, for instance, of some Germanic languages such as Yiddish or Icelandic. All this provides evidence in support of the view that Cimbrian syntax is likely to still have the core of the Germanic V2 rule (with VO word order) and that many phenomena can be explained in terms of internal structural development rather than a contact-induced change.

Another problematic aspect is the proposed three-way classification of the subject pronouns into accented, proclitic, and enclitic (p. 81). It is true that Cimbrian has a third type of subject pronouns that differ from the strong and the enclitic forms. However, it seems incorrect to me to classify this third type as proclitic. First of all, these pronominal forms do not display a substantial morphonological reduction, involving in some cases the insertion of a dental. Second, they can appear in a phrase position, for instance, in Vorfeld, although they may not appear in an accented position, as preverbal subjects are structurally unaccented and the string subject–finite V is generally unmarked. Indeed, on p. 190 Kolmer no longer defines those preverbal pronominal forms as proclitic but rather as nicht stark betonte Pronomen ‘not strongly stressed pronouns’.