Modern English approaches the ideal of an isolating language. Open-class items have comparatively few forms, so that many inflectional categories either remain unmarked, or are expressed periphrastically. The inflectional system is particularly simple, even by the standards of a West Germanic language. Regular paradigms contain at most four forms, and the inflectional exponents that distinguish...

This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. acquired naturalistically by children in parts the world where these are not majority language. Summarizing research on different types speakers Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable vulnerable domains. We focus so far best studied areas, word order grammatical gender, addin...