The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and Southern Asia, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia. With written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age, in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean (IE) language family A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term comes from the Tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree or in a subsequent modification to species in a. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic , or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor (proto-language) of all the Germanic languages such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe The Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe designates the earliest part of the Iron Age in Scandinavia, northern Germany, and the Netherlands north of the Rhine River. These regions feature many extensive archaeological excavation sites, which have yielded a wealth of artifacts. Objects discovered at the sites suggest that the Pre-Roman Iron Age. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are [p], pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and [s], pronounced by forcing air through a change known as Grimm's law Grimm's law named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic peoples The Germanic peoples are a historical ethno-linguistic group, originating in Northern Europe and identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages, which diversified out of Common Germanic in the course of the Pre-Roman Iron Age. The descendants of these peoples became, and in many areas contributed to, the ethnic groups of North moving down from northern Europe in the second century BC, to settle in northern central Europe, along the boundary of Celtic civilization The Iron Age and Roman-era Celts were a diverse group of tribal societies in Europe who spoke Celtic languages, in the northerly lands of the future Roman Empire The Roman Empire was the post-Republican phase of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean. The term is used to describe the Roman state during and after the time of the first emperor, Augustus.

The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of and German German (Deutsch, [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Globally, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers, with approximately 309–400 million^[1][2] and over 100 million^[3] native speakers respectively. The group includes other major languages, such as Dutch Dutch ( Nederlands ) is a West Germanic language spoken by over 22 million people as a native language and over 5 million people as a second language. Most native speakers live in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, with smaller groups of speakers in parts of France, Germany and several former Dutch colonies. It is closely related to other with 23 million^[4] and Afrikaans Elsewhere in Africa, notably Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland with over 6 million native speakers;^[5] and the North Germanic languages The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is sometimes referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common including Norwegian Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants (see Danish language), Danish Danish (dansk, pronounced [d̥ænˀsɡ̊] ) is one of the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, Swedish Swedish ( svenska ) is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the Åland islands. It is to a considerable extent mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to a lesser extent with Danish (see especially "Classification"). Along, Icelandic Icelandic ( íslenska ) is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese and Faroese Faroese , is an Insular Nordic language spoken by 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000[citation needed] Faroese in Denmark and elsewhere. It is one of four languages descended from the Old West Norse language spoken in the Middle Ages, the others being Icelandic, Norwegian and the extinct Norn, which is thought to have been mutually with a combined total of about 20 million speakers.^[6] The SIL SIL International is a U.S.-based, worldwide non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy and aid minority language development. SIL provides a database, Ethnologue, of its research into the world's Ethnologue lists 53 different Germanic languages.

Characteristics

Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:

1. The leveling of the Indo-European verbal system of tense Tense is one of at least four qualities, along with mood, voice, and aspect, which utterances may express and aspect In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in the described event or state. In English, for example, the present tense sentences "I swim" and "I am swimming" differ in aspect (the first sentence is in what is called the habitual aspect, and the second is in what is called the into the present tense There are two common types of present tenses to be found in most Indo-European languages: the present indicative and the present subjunctive (i.e., the combination of present tense and subjunctive mood) and the past tense The past tense is a verb tense expressing action, activity, state or being in the past of the current moment , or prior to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future (in a relative tense system) (also called the preterite The preterite is the grammatical tense expressing actions that took place in the past)
2. A large class of verbs that use a dental suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Particularly in the study of Semitic languages, a suffix is called an afformative, as they can alter the form of the (/d/ or /t/) instead of vowel alternation In linguistics, apophony is the alternation of sounds within a word that indicates grammatical information (often inflectional) (Indo-European ablaut In linguistics, the term ablaut designates a system of vowel gradation in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages. (For the general phenomenon, see Apophony.) An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb sing, sang, sung and its related noun song) to indicate past tense; these are called the Germanic weak verbs In Germanic languages, including English, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, which are therefore often regarded as the norm, though historically they are not the oldest or most original group; the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the Germanic strong verbs In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of ablaut. In English, these are verbs like sing, sang, sung. The term "strong verb" is a translation of German "starkes Verb", which was coined by the linguist Jacob Grimm and contrasts with the so-called "weak verb" which forms its
3. The use of so-called strong and weak adjectives In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's referent. Collectively, adjectives form one of the traditional English eight parts of speech, though linguists today distinguish adjectives from words such as determiners that also used to be considered: different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives depending on the definiteness In grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context and entities which are not (indefinite noun phrases) of the noun phrase (modern English adjectives do not inflect at all, except for the comparative and superlative; this was not the case in Old English Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon, where adjectives were inflected differently depending on the type of determiner they were preceded by)
4. The consonant shift known as Grimm's Law Grimm's law named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives (the consonants in High German have shifted farther yet by the High German consonant shift In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or second Germanic consonant shift is a phonological development that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, and was almost complete before the earliest written records in the High)
5. Some words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families, but variants of which appear in almost all Germanic languages; see Germanic substrate hypothesis The Germanic substrate hypothesis is an attempt to explain the distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European language family. It postulates that the elements of the common Germanic vocabulary and syntactical forms which do not seem to have an Indo-European origin show Proto-Germanic to be a creole language: a
6. The shifting of stress accent onto the root of the stem and later to the first syllable of the word (though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what is added to them)

Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than do some other language families A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term comes from the Tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree or in a subsequent modification to species in a such as the Romance extinct: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkans (Dacian, or Slavic languages The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward analyticity In morphological typology , an isolating language (in fact the most extreme case of an analytic language) is any language in which words are composed of a single morpheme. This is in contrast to a synthetic language which can have words composed of multiple morphemes. Some, such as Icelandic Icelandic ( íslenska ) is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese, and to a lesser extent German German (Deutsch, [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Globally, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and reconstruction is far advanced and quite detailed. Others, such as English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of, Swedish Swedish ( svenska ) is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the Åland islands. It is to a considerable extent mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to a lesser extent with Danish (see especially "Classification"). Along, and Afrikaans Elsewhere in Africa, notably Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland, have moved toward a largely analytic type.

Another characteristic of Germanic languages is the verb second or V2 word order, which is quite uncommon cross-linguistically. This feature is shared by all modern Germanic languages except modern English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of (which nevertheless appears to have had V2 earlier in its history), which has largely replaced the structure with an overall Subject Verb Object In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements. It is the second most common order found in the world, after SOV, and together, they account for more than 75% of the world's syntax.

Writing

The earliest evidence of Germanic languages comes from names recorded in the first century by Tacitus Publius Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 – AD 117) was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors. These two works span the history of the Roman Empire (especially from his work Germania The Germania , written by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus around 98, is an ethnographic work on the Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire), but the earliest Germanic writing occurs in a single instance in the second century BC on the Negau helmet.^[7] From roughly the second century AD, certain speakers of early Germanic varieties developed the Elder Futhark, an early form of the Runic alphabet. Early runic inscriptions also are largely limited to personal names, and difficult to interpret. The Gothic language was written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible in the fourth century. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic varieties began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters. However, throughout the Viking Age, Runic alphabets remained in common use in Scandinavia. In addition to the standard Latin alphabet, many Germanic languages use a variety of accent marks and extra letters, including umlauts, the ß (Eszett), IJ, Ø, Æ, Å, Ä, Ü, Ö, Ð, Ȝ, and the runes Þ and Ƿ. In print, German used to be prevalently set in blackletter typefaces (e.g. fraktur or schwabacher) up until the 1940s (though see Antiqua–Fraktur dispute), whereas Kurrent and since the early 20th century Sütterlin was used for German handwriting.

History

All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic, united by subjection to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law. These probably took place during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe from ca. 500 BC, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age.

From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three groups, West, East, and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration period, so that some individual varieties are difficult to classify.

The sixth century Lombardic language for instance, may be a variety originally either Northern or Eastern, before being assimilated by West Germanic as the Lombards settled at the Elbe. The Western group would have formed in the late Jastorf culture, the Eastern group may be derived from the first century variety of Gotland (see Old Gutnish), leaving southern Sweden as the original location of the Northern group. The earliest coherent Germanic text preserved is the fourth century Gothic translation of the New Testament by Ulfilas. Early testimonies of West Germanic are in Old High German (scattered words and sentences sixth century, coherent texts ninth century) and Old English (coherent texts tenth century). North Germanic is only attested in scattered runic inscriptions, as Proto-Norse, until it evolves into Old Norse by about 800.

Longer runic inscriptions survive from the eighth and ninth centuries (Eggjum stone, Rök stone), longer texts in the Latin alphabet survive from the twelfth century (Íslendingabók), and some skaldic poetry held to date back to as early as the ninth century.

By about the tenth century, the varieties had diverged enough to make inter-comprehensibility difficult. The linguistic contact of the Viking settlers of the Danelaw with the Anglo-Saxons left traces in the English language, and is suspected to have facilitated the collapse of Old English grammar that resulted in Middle English from the twelfth century.

The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration period. The Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically assimilated by their respective neighbors by about the seventh century, with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the eighteenth century.

During the early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand, and by the High German consonant shift on the continent on the other, resulting in Upper German and Low Saxon, with graded intermediate Central German varieties. By Early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North and, although both extremes are considered German, they are hardly mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties had completed the second sound shift, while the northern varieties remained unaffected by the consonant shift.

The North Germanic languages, on the other hand, remained more unified, with the peninsular languages largely retaining mutual intelligibility into modern times.

Classification

Note that divisions between and among subfamilies of Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form continuous clines, with adjacent varieties being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.

Diachronic

The table below shows the succession of the significant historical stages of each language (vertically), and their approximate groupings in subfamilies (horizontally). Horizontal sequence within each group does not imply a measure of greater or lesser similarity.

• ^1 There are conflicting opinions on the classification of Lombardic. Contrary to its isolated position in the table above, it also has been classified as close to either Upper German or Old Saxon. See the article on the Lombardic language for more information.
• ^2 Late Middle Ages refers to the post-Black Death period. Especially for the language situation in Norway this event was important.
• ^3 From Early Northern Middle English^[8]. McClure gives Northumbrian Old English^[9]. In the Oxford Companion to the English Language (p. 894) the 'sources' of Scots are described as "the Old English of the Kingdom of Bernicia" and "the Scandinavian-influenced English of immigrants from Northern and Midland England in the 12-13c [...]." The historical stages 'Early—Middle—Modern Scots' are used, for example, in the "Concise Scots Dictionary"^[10] and "A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue"^[11].
• ^4 The speakers of Norn were assimilated to speak the Modern Scots varieties.
• ^5 The Gutnish language today is practically a dialect of Swedish.

Contemporary

All living Germanic languages belong either to the West Germanic or to the North Germanic branch. The West Germanic group is the larger by far, further subdivided into Anglo-Frisian on one hand, and Continental West Germanic on the other. Anglo-Frisian notably includes English and all its variants, while Continental West Germanic includes German (standard register and dialects) as well as Dutch (standard register and dialects).

• West Germanic languages
  • High German languages (includes Standard German, see also German dialects)
    • Central German
      • East Central German
      • West Central German
        • Luxembourgish
        • Pennsylvania German (spoken by the Amish and other groups in southeastern Pennsylvania)
    • Upper German
      • Alemannic German
      • Austro-Bavarian German
    • Yiddish
  • Low Franconian
    • Dutch (see Dutch dialects)
    • Afrikaans (separate standard language)
  • Low German
    • West Low German
    • East Low German
      • Plautdietsch
  • Anglo-Frisian
    • Frisian group
    • English group
      • English (see English dialects)
      • Lowland Scots
      • Yola
• North Germanic
  • West Scandinavian
    • Norwegian (genealogically Western branch, but heavy influence from Eastern branch)
    • Icelandic
    • Faroese
    • Norn (extinct)
  • East Scandinavian
    • Danish
    • Swedish
    • Gutnish

Vocabulary comparison

Several of the terms in the table below have had semantic drift. For example, the form Sterben and other terms for die are cognates with the English word starve. There is also at least one example of a common borrowing from a non-Germanic source (ounce and its cognates from Latin).

See also

• Germanic verb and its various subordinated articles
• Language families and languages
• Non-Indo-European roots of Germanic languages
• List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents
• Germanisation and Anglicisation
• Germanic name
• Germanic placenames
• German name
• German placename etymology

Notes

1. ^ Ethnologue on English
2. ^ Curtis, Andy. Color, Race, And English Language Teaching: Shades of Meaning. 2006, page 192.
3. ^ SIL Ethnologue (2006). 95 million speakers of Standard German; 95 million including Middle and Upper German dialects; 120 million including Low Saxon and Yiddish.
4. ^ Dutch, University College London
5. ^ Ethnologue on Afrikaans
6. ^ Holmberg, Anders and Christer Platzack (2005). "The Scandinavian languages". In The Comparative Syntax Handbook, eds Guglielmo Cinque and Richard S. Kayne. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Excerpt at Durham University.
7. ^ Malcolm Todd (1992). The Early Germans. Blackwell Publishing.
8. ^ Aitken, A. J. and McArthur, T. Eds. (1979) Languages of Scotland. Edinburgh,Chambers. p. 87
9. ^ McClure (1991) in The Cambridge History of the English Language Vol. 5. p. 23.
10. ^ Robinson M. (ed.) (1985) the "Concise Scots Dictionary, Chambers, Edinburgh. p. xiii
11. ^ Dareau M., Pike l. and Watson, H (eds) (2002) "A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue" Vol. XII, Oxford University Press. p. xxxiv
12. ^ The cognate means 'potato'. The correct word is 'Súrepli'.
13. ^ Brett used in Southern, Bord also used in Northern Germany
14. ^ Attested meaning 'letter', but also means beech in other Germanic languages, cf. Russian buk 'beech', bukva 'letter', maybe from Gothic.
15. ^ Means to kill, correct translation would be kepót
16. ^ Now only used in compound words such as hoofpyn (headache) and metaphorically, such as hoofstad (capital city).
17. ^ ^{a b c d e} From an old Latin borrowing, akin to "cup".
18. ^ Means main (like huudjstad is capital) Correct translation would be kop
19. ^ ^{a b} Archaic: now only used in compound words such as 'heimwee' (homesickness).
20. ^ ^{a b c} From a compound phrase akin to "to house"
21. ^ Ongel is also used for fishing hook.
22. ^ Archaic
23. ^ Old and decayed.
24. ^ Dialectally Tvo/Två/Tvei (m)/Tvæ (f)/Tvau (n).
25. ^ ^{a b c} The cognate orm usually means 'snake'.

External links

• Germanic Lexicon Project
• 'Hover & Hear' pronunciations of the same Germanic words in dozens of Germanic languages and 'dialects', including English accents, and compare instantaneously side by side.
• Bibliographie der Schreibsprachen: Bibliography of medieval written forms of High and Low German and Dutch
• Ethnologue Report for Germanic
• Todays geographical extension, Worldmap on the German Wiki
• 'Hover & Hear' pronunciations of the same Germanic words in dozens of Germanic languages and 'dialects', including English accents, and compare instantaneously side by side.

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