Germanic Languages

a group of related languages spoken mostly in the western part of Europe; one of the branches of the Indo-European language family. Among the modern Germanic languages, English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and Yiddish (the modern Jewish language, which originated during the tenth to 12th centuries based on Middle High German dialects) belong to the western group, and Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese form the northern, or Scandinavian, group. Afrikaans, or Boer, the official language of the Republic of South Africa, originated from a mixture of Dutch dialects brought to South Africa by settlers from Holland in the 17th century.

Ancient Germanic languages are taken to be all the related dialects that, together with the Celtic, Italic, Illyrian, and Venetic languages, belong to the western range of Indo-European languages. Like the modern languages, the ancient Germanic languages show similar traits in grammar, word formation, and vocabulary (compare Middle Gothic handus, Old English hond, modern English hand, Old German hant, modern German Hand, Old Icelandic hond, and Swedish hand). At the same time, the ancient Germanic languages are characterized by a considerable number of words that have no equivalent in other Indo-European languages, above all terms relating to navigation, and by a wealth of fricative consonants and consonant shifts, which distinguish ancient Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages. The vowel system of the ancient Germanic languages is marked by comparative poverty and numerous combinational changes, as well as by two types of adjective declension—strong (so-called pronominal) and weak. The verb in the ancient Germanic languages has no special form for the future and no distinct voice differentiation. At the same time, there are two types of conjugation: in the strong conjugation, the past tense is formed by alternation of the vowels in the stem; in the weak conjugation, the past tense is formed by the addition of a dental suffix.

The most ancient monuments of the Germanic languages are preserved in the so-called runic inscriptions, the earliest of which apparently dates to the third century. A written language based on Latin script appeared after the spread of Christianity, beginning approximately in the eighth and ninth centuries. At the beginning of the Common Era the Germanic languages appeared as the languages of many German tribal groups on the shores of the North and Baltic seas, in Jutland, and at the southern tip of Scandinavia.

The sequence in which the ancient Germanic tribal dialects differentiated can be judged from various sources, beginning in about the first century B.C. The northern (Scandinavian) and southern (Continental) groups were the first to form; then, in the third to first centuries B.C., the eastern Germanic tribes (the Vindelicians) migrated from Scandinavia to the continent, and the eastern Germanic group (on the shores of the Baltic Sea) separated. In the second and third centuries A.D. the migration of the Goths into the steppes near the Black Sea took place, and an individual Gothic language began to develop. By the first century the western Germanic tribes divided into three groups: the Ingaevones (on the North Sea), the Istaevones (on the Rhine and Weser), and the Herminones on the Elbe). In the fifth and sixth centuries the Anglo-Saxons moved into the British Isles, and the separation of Anglo-Saxon as Old English took place (written monuments of the seventh century). In approximately the fourth and fifth centuries the Saxons migrated from the shores of the North Sea toward the southwest, to the banks of the Weser and the Rhine. Beginning in the first century the Herminones moved from the lower and middle Elbe to southern Germany. In the third to fifth centuries the Alemanni and Bavarians, who later were the carriers of the “south Germanic” dialects, occupied the southern German lands. (The second, “south Germanic,” consonant shift took place in about the sixth century; from the seventh to 16th centuries the south Germanic consonant shift spread to the area of Middle German dialects—Frankish, Hessian, and Thuringian.) In the late fifth century the Franks (Istaevones) expanded to the west, into the territory of Romanized northern Gaul, and the bilingual Frankish state of the Merovingians took shape.

A precondition for the formation of a German nationality and its language, Old High German (written monuments date from the mid-eighth century), was the unification in the Merovingian and Carolingian state (fifth to ninth centuries) of the western German tribes—the Franks (Istaevones), the Alemanni and Bavarians (Herminones), the Chatti (Hessians) and Thuringians, and later the Saxons (Ingaevones)—under Frankish rule. In the ninth through 16th centuries the tribal dialects within Old High German interacted under the influence of the Frankish dialect. The separation of the Scandinavian languages from Continental Germanic began in the fifth century, and the differentiation of the eastern and western groups of the Scandinavian dialects began in the seventh century; the settlement of Jutland by the Danes (from eastern Scandinavia) occurred in the fifth and sixth centuries, and the settlement of Iceland by the Norwegians (from western Scandinavia) took place in the second half of the ninth century. The languages of the Scandinavian nationalities—Old Swedish, Old Danish, Old Norwegian, and Old Icelandic— formed in the 12th and 13th centuries (monuments in Latin script date from that period).