The fourteen essays in this volume are representative of the 1998 Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable. New Insights in Germanic Linguistics II displays a fairly equal interest in historical and contemporary language data. It is ever more evident that linguists appeal to diachronic facts when interpreting synchronic data and the reverse. A rich array of cross-linguistic evidence pervades the volume. Every component of the grammar from phonology through semantics and pragmatics is addressed and the methods applied range from laboratory phonetics to optimality theory and sociolinguistics/fieldwork.