Germanic languages

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Germanic
Geographic
distribution: In northern, western and central Europe
Genetic
classification: Indo-European
 Germanic
Subdivisions:
Number of native speakers: ~559 million
ISO 639-2 and 639-5: gem

Indo-European topics

Indo-European languages (list)
Albanian · Armenian · Baltic
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extinct: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkans (Dacian,
Phrygian, Thracian) · Tocharian

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Proto-Indo-Europeans
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Urheimat hypotheses
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Indo-European studies

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 civilization, in the northerly lands of the future Roman Empire.

The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 309-400 million[1][2] and over 100 million[3] native speakers respectively. The group includes other major languages, such as Dutch with 23 million[4] and Afrikaans with over 6 million native speakers[5]; and the North Germanic languages including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese with a combined total of about 20 million speakers.[6] The SIL 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 and aspect into the present tense and the past tense (also called the preterite)
2. A large class of verbs that use a dental suffix (/d/ or /t/) instead of vowel alternation (Indo-European ablaut) to indicate past tense; these are called the Germanic weak verbs; the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the Germanic strong verbs
3. 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)
4. The consonant shift known as Grimm's Law (the consonants in High German have shifted farther yet by the High German consonant shift)
5. 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
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 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[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

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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.