The monograph consists of two main parts and two additional parts. The first part brings the oldest linguistic, epigraphical and archaeological information about early speakers of the Germanic languages. The second part summarizes histories of all individual languages from their tribal past recorded by the ancient authors and reflected in early epigraphic monuments through their literary traditions to the present. Appendices mediate main models of genealogical classification of both Germanic within the Indo-European family and the Germanic branch proper; comparative phonetics and morphology of the Old Germanic languages; several longer ancient and medieval texts; survey of the Old Germanic scripts; lexicostatistic classification of the Old Germanic languages and the Frisian dialects. Bibliography is divided into two sections: (1) Primary sources. (2) Diachronic studies.