The
Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the
Indo-European (IE)
language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is
Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in
Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the
consonant change known as
Grimm's law. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the
Germanic peoples moving down from northern Europe in the second century BC, to settle in northern central Europe, along the boundary of
Celtic civilisation, in the northerly lands of the future
Roman Empire.
The most widely spoken Germanic languages are
English and
German, with approximately 309-400 million and over 100 million native speakers respectively. The group includes other major languages, such as
Dutch with 23 million and
Afrikaans with over 6 million native speakers; and the
North Germanic languages including
Norwegian,
Danish,
Swedish,
Icelandic, and
Faroese with a combined total of about 20 million speakers.
[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. .] The
SIL Ethnologue lists 53 different Germanic languages.
Characteristics
Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:
- The use of so-called strong and weak adjectives: different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives depending on the definiteness 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, where adjectives were inflected differently depending on the type of determiner they were preceded by)
- A number of 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 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 such as the
Romance or
Slavic languages. Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward
analyticity. Some, such as
Icelandic, and to a lesser extent
German, have preserved much of the complex
inflectional morphology inherited from the
Proto-Indo-European language. Others, such as
English,
Swedish, and
Afrikaans 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 (which nevertheless appears to have had V2 earlier in its history), which has largely replaced the structure with an overall
Subject Verb Object syntax.
Writing
The earliest evidence of Germanic languages comes from names recorded in the first century by
Tacitus (especially from his work
Germania), but the earliest Germanic writing occurs in a single instance in the second century BC on the
Negau helmet.
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,
, and the runes
Þ and
. Historical printed
German is frequently set in
blackletter typefaces (e.g.
fraktur or
schwabacher).
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.
West Germanic languages
North Germanic languages
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.
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).
- ** Norwegian (genealogically Western branch, but heavy influence from Eastern branch)
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
