The success of the volumes in the series Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft has encouraged the publisher to plan revisions of them every fifteen years or so in order to incorporate newly assembled corpora of data, newly emerging methodologies, and new research; to recognize changing empirical domains as the boundaries between them shift or disappear; and to reflect new political realities and linguistic trends within a rapidly changing Europe. The two volumes of the first edition of Sprachgeschichte appeared in 1984 and 1985, respectively. The second edition, of which only the first of three volumes is under consideration here, is—as the subtitle promises—an expansion and elaboration of the first, taking into consideration recent research, new theoretical approaches to old problems, newly developed method-ologies, and the increased interest in linguistic developments in the German-speaking world since 1945.