Reviews for Who Does This Language Belong To?: Personal Narratives of Language Claim and Identity

The average rating for Who Does This Language Belong To?: Personal Narratives of Language Claim and Identity based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-18 00:00:00 Becky Williams This here is an entry in Routledge's Language Family Descriptions series that gives brief grammatical overviews of the main languages in this family, ancient and modern. The languages covered here are Gothic, Old Norse and Middle Scandinavian, Old and Middle Continental West Germanic, Old and Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Yiddish, Pennsylvania German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, English, and finally Germanic creoles. Like other entries in this series, the grammar, population, and lexis of each language is treated. It is nice to see so many descriptions of ancient languages and emphasis on historical linguistics. The chapter on Gothic, which attempts to use the language to reconstruct Proto-Germanic was written by Winfred Lehmann, one of the greatest comparative Indo-European linguists of the 20th century and a keen investigator of the Germanic branch. Among the entries on modern languages, the careful attention to tones in the chapters on Norwegian and Swedish make this a useful resource. The book also includes many maps to show geographic divisions of languages and their dialects. My only real complaint about the book is that it does not provide a sample text in the language with grammatical explication at the end of each chapter like, for example, Routledge's survey of the Uralic languages. It also doesn't treat several minority languages like Luxembourgish or Swiss German, seeing them as dialects in a grander scheme.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-06 00:00:00 P. Silverman Comprehensive and yet accessible, The Germanic Languages is a highly readable account of the historical, phonological and morphosyntactical structures of the extant Germanic languages by a cast of some of the most eminent scholars of Germanic philology today.