ABSTRACT
On the face of it, the educated speaker of English would have little reason to think of English and German as variant forms of the same language. There are enormous differences between the two systems of communication, involving pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and monolingual speakers of the two systems cannot understand each other at all. This fact, and other considerations of national identity, separate history, and the like, are indeed what lead us to characterize the two as separate languages.
