English is by far the most-spoken West Germanic language, with more than 1billion speakers worldwide. Within Europe, the three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct variety of West Germanic. The language family also includesAfrikaans,Yiddish,Low Saxon,Luxembourgish,Hunsrik, andScots. Additionally, severalcreoles,patois, andpidgins are based on Dutch, English, or German.
The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West,East andNorth Germanic.[4] In some cases, their exact relation was difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, so that some individual varieties have been difficult to classify. This is especially true for the unattestedJute language; today, most scholars classifyJute as a West Germanic variety with several features of North Germanic.[5][6]
Until the late 20th century, some scholars claimed that all Germanic languages remained mutually intelligible throughout theMigration Period, while others hold that speakers of West Germanic dialects likeOld Frankish and speakers ofGothic were already unable to communicate fluently by around the 3rd century AD. As a result of the substantial progress in the study of Proto-West Germanic in the early 21st century, there is a growing consensus that East and West Germanic indeed would have been mutually unintelligible at that time,[7] whereas West and North Germanic remained partially intelligible.[8]
[ð], the fricative allophone of/d/, becomes[d] in all positions.[13] (The two other fricatives[β] and[ɣ] are retained.). This must have occurred after*-zw- and*- đw- have become*-ww-.[14]
Replacement of the second-person singular preterite ending-t with-ī (indicative andsubjunctive mood).[15] For more than 150 years there has been a scientific debate on the best explanation of these difficult forms. Today, some linguists, beginning with J. v. Fierlinger in 1885[16] and followed by R. Löwe (1907),[17] O. Behaghel (1922),[18]Jakob Sverdrup (1927),Hermann Hirt (1932),[19]E. Polomé (1964),[20] W. Meid (1971),[21] E. Hill (2004),[22] K.-H. Mottausch[23] and W. Euler (1992ff.)[24] explain this ending as a relic of theIndo-European aorist tense. Under this assumption, the ending-t would have replaced older-ī(z). Sceptical about this explanation – and mostly explaining these forms as influenced byoptative forms – areW. Scherer (1868),W. L. van Helten (before 1917),Edward Schröder (1921), Bammesberger (1986) andDon Ringe (2014).
Loss of word-final/z/.[25][26][27] Only Old High German preserves it at all (as/r/) and only in single-syllable words. Following the later loss of word-final/a/ and/aN/, this made the nominative and accusative of many nouns identical.
Loss of final*-a (including from PGmc.*-an#) in polysyllables: e.g. acc. sg. OHGhorn vs. ORu.horna 'horn'; this change must have occurred after the loss of word-final/z/.[14]
West Germanic gemination: lengthening of all consonants except/r/ before/j/.;[28][29] this change must have occurred after the loss of final *-a.[14]
A relative chronology of about 20 sound changes from Proto-Northwest Germanic to Proto-West Germanic (some of them only regional) was published by Don Ringe in 2014.[11]
A phonological archaism of West Germanic is the preservation ofgrammatischer Wechsel in most verbs, particularly in Old High German.[31] This implies the same for West Germanic,[32] whereas in East and North Germanic many of these alternations (in Gothic almost all of them) had been levelled out analogically by the time of the earliest texts.
A common morphological innovation of the West Germanic languages is the development of agerund.[33]
Common morphological archaisms of West Germanic include:
the preservation of some traces[which?] of theaorist (in Old English and Old High German, but neither in Gothic nor inNorth Germanic).[37][38]
Furthermore, the West Germanic languages share manylexemes not existing in North Germanic and/or East Germanic – archaisms[39] as well as common neologisms.[40][41] Some lexemes have specific meanings in West Germanic[42] and there are specific innovations in word formation and derivational morphology,[43] for example neologisms ending with modern English-ship (< wgerm.-*skapi, cf. German-schaft) likefriendship (< wg.*friund(a)skapi, cf. GermanFreundschaft) are specific to the West Germanic languages and are thus seen as a Proto West Germanic innovation.[44][45]
Since at least the early 20th century, a number of morphological, phonological, and lexical archaisms and innovations have been identified as specifically West Germanic. Since then, individual Proto-West Germanic lexemes have also been reconstructed. Yet, there was a long dispute if these West Germanic characteristics had to be explained with the existence of a West Germanic proto-language or rather withSprachbund effects.Hans Frede Nielsen's 1981 studyOld English and the Continental Germanic Languages[46] made the conviction grow that a West Germanic proto-language did exist. But up until the 1990s, some scholars doubted that there was once a Proto-West Germanicproto-language which was ancestral only to later West Germanic languages.[47] In 2002, Gert Klingenschmitt presented a series of pioneering reconstructions of Proto-West Germanic morphological paradigmas and new views on some early West Germanic phonological changes,[48] and in 2013 the first monographic analysis and description of Proto-West Germanic was published (second edition 2022).[49]
Today, there is a scientific consensus[50] on what Don Ringe stated in 2012, that "these [phonological and morphological] changes amount to a massive evidence for a valid West Germanic clade".[51]
After East Germanic broke off (an event usually dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC), the remaining Germanic languages, theNorthwest Germanic languages, divided into four main dialects:[52][obsolete source] North Germanic, and the three groups conventionally called "West Germanic", namely:
Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian (because of the characteristic features of its daughter languages, Anglo-Saxon/Old English andOld Frisian), linguists know almost nothing about "Weser–Rhine Germanic" and "Elbe Germanic". In fact, both terms were coined in the 1940s to refer to groups of archaeological findings, rather than linguistic features. Only later were the terms applied to hypothetical dialectal differences within both regions. Even today, the very small number ofMigration Periodrunic inscriptions from the area, many of them illegible, unclear or consisting only of one word, often a name, is insufficient to identify linguistic features specific to the two supposed dialect groups.
Evidence that East Germanic split off before the split between North and West Germanic comes from a number of linguistic innovations common to North and West Germanic,[9][page needed] including:
The lowering of Proto-Germanicē (/ɛː/, also writtenǣ) toā.[a]
The development of thedemonstrative pronoun ancestral to Englishthis.
Under that view, the properties that the West Germanic languages have in common, separate from the North Germanic languages, are not necessarily inherited from a "Proto-West Germanic" language, but may have spread bylanguage contact among the Germanic languages spoken in Central Europe, not reaching those spoken in Scandinavia or reaching them much later. Rhotacism, for example, was largely complete in West Germanic while North Germanic runic inscriptions still clearly distinguished the two phonemes. There is also evidence that the lowering ofē toā occurred first in West Germanic and spread to North Germanic later since word-finalē was lowered before it was shortened in West Germanic, but in North Germanic the shortening occurred first, resulting ine that later merged withi. However, there are also a number of common archaisms in West Germanic shared by neither Old Norse nor Gothic. Some authors who support the concept of a West Germanic proto-language claim that, not only shared innovations can require the existence of a linguisticclade, but also that there are archaisms that cannot be explained simply as retentions later lost in the North or East, because this assumption can produce contradictions with attested features of the other branches.[clarification needed]
The debate on the existence of a Proto-West Germanic clade was summarized (2006):
That North Germanic is ... a unitary subgroup [of Proto-Germanic] is completely obvious, as all of its dialects shared a long series of innovations, some of them very striking. That the same is true of West Germanic has been denied, but I will argue in vol. ii that all the West Germanic languages share several highly unusual innovations that virtually force us to posit a West Germanic clade. On the other hand, the internal subgrouping of both North Germanic and West Germanic is very messy, and it seems clear that each of those subfamilies diversified into a network of dialects that remained in contact for a considerable period of time (in some cases right up to the present).[53]
Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West Germanic morphological paradigms[54] and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West Germanic morphological forms or lexemes. The first comprehensive reconstruction of the Proto-West Germanic language was published in 2013 byWolfram Euler,[55] followed in 2014 by the study ofDonald Ringe and Ann Taylor.[56]
If indeed Proto-West Germanic existed, it must have been between the 2nd and 7th centuries. Until the late 2nd century AD, the language of runic inscriptions found in Scandinavia and in Northern Germany were so similar that Proto-North Germanic and the Western dialects in the south were still part of one language ("Proto-Northwest Germanic").
Sometime after that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. By the 4th and 5th centuries thegreat migration set in. By the end of the 6th century, the area in which West Germanic languages were spoken, at least by the upper classes, had tripled compared to the year 400. This caused an increasing disintegration of the West Germanic language and finally the formation of the daughter languages.[57]
It has been argued that, judging by their nearly identical syntax, the West Germanic dialects were closely enough related to have been mutually intelligible up to the 7th century.[b] Over the course of this period, the dialects diverged successively. TheHigh German consonant shift that occurred mostly during the 7th century AD in what is now southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland can be considered the end of the linguistic unity among the West Germanic dialects, although its effects on their own should not be overestimated. Bordering dialects very probably continued to be mutually intelligible even beyond the boundaries of the consonant shift.
TheHigh German consonant shift distinguished theHigh German languages from the other West Germanic languages. By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging fromHighest Alemannic in the South (theWalliser dialect being the southernmost surviving German dialect) toNorthern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are consideredGerman, they are not mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, whereas the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift.
Of modern German varieties,Low German is the one that most resembles modern English. The district ofAngeln (or Anglia), from which the nameEnglish derives, is in the extreme northern part of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. The area of the Saxons (parts of today'sSchleswig-Holstein andLower Saxony) lay south of Anglia. TheAngles andSaxons, twoGermanic tribes, in combination with a number of other peoples from northernGermany and theJutland Peninsula, particularly theJutes, settled in Britain following the end of Roman rule in the island. Once in Britain, these Germanic peoples eventually developed a shared cultural and linguistic identity asAnglo-Saxons; the extent of the linguistic influence of the nativeRomano-British population on the incomers is debatable.
The varieties of the continental West Germanic dialect continuum since 1945:[59][60][61][62]
Grouping of the main Germanic tribes (which can be equated with their languages/dialects) according toFriedrich Maurer
Divisions between subfamilies of continental Germanic languages are rarely precisely defined; most formdialect continua, with adjacentdialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.
The following table shows a list of various linguistic features and their extent among the West Germanic languages, organized roughly from northwest to southeast. Some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages.
The following table shows some comparisons of consonant development in the respective dialect/language (online examples though) continuum, showing the gradually growing partake in theHigh German consonant shift and the anglofrisian palatalization. The table usesIPA, to avoid confusion via orthographical differences. The realisation of [r] will be ignored.
C = any consonant, A = back vowel, E = front vowel
The existence of a unified Proto-West Germanic language is debated. Features which are common to West Germanic languages may be attributed either to common inheritance or to areal effects.
The phonological system of the West Germanic branching as reconstructed is mostly similar to that of Proto-Germanic, with some changes in the categorization and phonetic realization of some phonemes.
The following table compares a number of Frisian, English, Scots, Yola, Dutch, Limburgish, German and Afrikaans words with common West Germanic (or older) origin. Thegrammatical gender of each term is noted as masculine (m.), feminine (f.), or neuter (n.) where relevant.
Note that some of the shown similarities of Frisian and English vis-à-vis Dutch and German are secondary and not due to a closer relationship between them. For example, the plural of the word for "sheep" was originally unchanged in all four languages and still is in some Dutch dialects and a great deal of German dialects. Many other similarities, however, are indeed old inheritances.
^However, seeCercignani, Fausto,Indo-European ē in Germanic, in «Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung», 86/1, 1972, pp. 104–110.
^Graeme Davis (2006:154) notes "the languages of the Germanic group in the Old period are much closer than has previously been noted. Indeed it would not be inappropriate to regard them as dialects of one language. They are undoubtedly far closer one to another than are the various dialects of modern Chinese, for example. A reasonable modern analogy might be Arabic, where considerable dialectical diversity exists but within the concept of a single Arabic language." In:Davis, Graeme (2006).Comparative Syntax of Old English and Old Icelandic: Linguistic, Literary and Historical Implications. Bern: Peter Lang.ISBN3-03910-270-2.
^Original meaning "relative" has become "brother or sister" in English.
^Hawkins, John A. (1987). "Germanic languages". InBernard Comrie (ed.).The World's Major Languages. Oxford University Press. pp. 68–76.ISBN0-19-520521-9.
^Meid, Wolfgang (1971). "Das germanische Präteritum", Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, p. 13; Euler, Wolfram/Badenheuer, Konrad (2009), "Sprache und Herkunft der Germanen", pp. 168–171, London/Berlin: Inspiration Un Ltd.
^Kuhn, Hans (1955–56). "Zur Gliederung der germanischen Sprachen".Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur.86:1–47.
^Ringe, Don. 2006:A Linguistic History of English. Volume I. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, Oxford University Press, p. 213-214.
^H. F. Nielsen (1981, 2001), G. Klingenschmitt (2002) and K.-H. Mottausch (1998, 2011)
^Wolfram Euler:Das Westgermanische – von der Herausbildung im 3. bis zur Aufgliederung im 7. Jahrhundert — Analyse und Rekonstruktion (West Germanic: From its Emergence in the 3rd Century to its Split in the 7th Century: Analyses and Reconstruction). 244 p., in German with English summary, London/Berlin 2013,ISBN978-3-9812110-7-8.
^Map based on: Meineke, Eckhard & Schwerdt, Judith, Einführung in das Althochdeutsche, Paderborn/Zürich 2001, pp. 209.
^W. Heeringa:Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences using Levenshtein Distance. University of Groningen, 2009, pp. 232–234.
^Peter Wiesinger:Die Einteilung der deutschen Dialekte. In: Werner Besch, Ulrich Knoop, Wolfgang Putschke, Herbert Ernst Wiegand (Hrsg.):Dialektologie. Ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung, 2. Halbband. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1983,ISBN3-11-009571-8, pp. 807–900.
^Werner König:dtv-Atlas Deutsche Sprache. 19. Auflage. dtv, München 2019,ISBN978-3-423-03025-0, pp. 230.
^C. Giesbers:Dialecten op de grens van twee talen. Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 2008, pp. 233.
^Hickey, Raymond (2005).Dublin English: Evolution and Change. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 196–198.ISBN90-272-4895-8.
^Hickey, Raymond (2002).A Source Book for Irish English. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 28–29.ISBN9027237530.
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