The articles gathered here go back to papers held at the colloquium on ALanguage CriticismA held at the German Studies Department of the Technical University of Aachen (RWTH) on 19 February 1999. Their common theme is the joint interest of German Studies scholars, whether in literary studies or linguistics, in a perspective that can be referred with terms like "language criticism," "language reflection," possibly also "language culture" or "cultivation." The contributions can be read as a plea to re-establish a language-critical component (as opposed to a merely descriptive one) in the engagement with (German) language and literature.