What is West Germanic today?

Most work devoted to the delineation and development of West Germanic focuses on its prehistory and early history as a branch of Germanic. The present contribution rather wishes to draw attention to certain characteristic differences between the present-day (High) German, Dutch, (West) Frisian and English standard languages which may appear interesting in view of their presumably common West Germanic origin. The discussion is based on a number of morphosyntactic phenomena that have proved useful in current studies of linguistic typology, including in particular word order and case-marking as well as certain characteristic features of verb constructions and verb morphology.