"This volume grows from recent collaboration among a group of scholars working on Germanic immigrant languages spoken in North America, initially faculty and students working on German dialects and Norwegian, and steadily expanding since to cover the family more broadly. More structured cooperation began with a small workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison four years ago and continued with larger workshops sponsored in turn by the University of Oslo, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Iceland. The volume you're reading is the first group publication in English (though see Johannessen and Salmons 2012 for a collection of papers on and written in Norwegian), and several others are in preparation. Most of the papers included in this volume have grown from the ongoing set of international workshops just sketched. These were started by the co-editors, led initially by the first co-editor, a trajectory reflected in the relatively heavy representation of work on Norwegian. A number of the chapters have been developed specifically from these networks and ongoing dialogues about heritage languages" -- Introduction

Includes bibliographical references and index.