Wisconsin is one of the most linguistically rich places in North America. It has the greatest diversity of American Indian languages east of the Mississippi, including Ojibwe and Menominee from the Algonquian language family, Ho-Chunk from the Siouan family, and Oneida from the Iroquoian family. French place names dot the state's map. German, Norwegian, and Polish--the languages of immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--are still spoken by tens of thousands of people, and the influx of new immigrants speaking Spanish, Hmong, and Somali continues to enrich the state's...

This textbook provides a detailed introduction to the development of the German language from prehistory to the present. This second edition has been extensively revised to include coverage of syntactic change, sociolinguistics, language variation, and language contact, as well as more detailed definitions and background information for beginners.