Dialect and Language Contact in Emerging Germanic * Benjamin Frey and Joseph Salmons University of Wisconsin–Madison 0. Introduction In the most basic terms of how we think about prehistory, one of the most important and lasting accomplishments of J.P. Mallory’s career has been to help the field focus on the necessity of bringing the full range of available data to bear on a problem and integrating all of it into a coherent analysis, including evidence from linguistics and (pre-) history. While it does not lie as far back in prehistory as the topics of Mallory’s own research, the late prehistory and earliest history of Germanic provide an opportunity to apply his insights profitably to some new research. Our understanding of the “breakup” of Germanic into daughter dialects has been transformed in recent years. This has been driven on the one hand by excellent new work on contact in early Germanic, culminating in Roberge (2010 and 2011), and on the other hand, by new research on the early political, social, and ethnic history of central Europe such as Heather (2010). Work like * An early version of this paper was presented at the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC) in Austin, Texas, April 2011. In addition to the audience at that talk, we thank the following for discussions on this topic and comments on earlier versions of this manuscript: the editors, Joshua Bousquette, Todd Ehresmann, Rob Howell, Monica Macaulay, Paul Roberge Alyson Sewell, and most especially Martin E. Huld and Mark Harvey for especially helpful comments. The usual disclaimers apply.