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Germanic languages

The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people[nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia and Germany.[2]

Not to be confused with the German language.

Germanic

Worldwide, principally Northern, Western and Central Europe, the Americas (Anglo-America, Caribbean Netherlands and Suriname), Southern Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Oceania

52- (phylozone)

The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers;[3][nb 2] German, with over 100 million native speakers;[4] and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch originating from the Afrikaners of South Africa, with over 7.1 million native speakers;[5] Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it[6][7][8] (at least 2.2 million in Germany (2016)[7] and 2.15 million in the Netherlands (2003));[9][6] Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe,[10] now with approximately 1.5 million native speakers; Scots, with 1.5 million native speakers; Limburgish varieties with roughly 1.3 million speakers along the DutchBelgianGerman border; and the Frisian languages with over 500,000 native speakers in the Netherlands and Germany.


The largest North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, which are in part mutually intelligible and have a combined total of about 20 million native speakers in the Nordic countries and an additional five million second language speakers; since the Middle Ages, however, these languages have been strongly influenced by Middle Low German, a West Germanic language, and Low German words account for about 30–60% of their vocabularies according to various estimates. Other extant North Germanic languages are Faroese, Icelandic, and Elfdalian, which are more conservative languages with no significant Low German influence, more complex grammar and limited mutual intelligibility with other North Germanic languages today.[11]


The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, all of which are now extinct. The last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken until the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.[12]


The SIL Ethnologue lists 48 different living Germanic languages, 41 of which belong to the Western branch and six to the Northern branch; it places Riograndenser Hunsrückisch German in neither of the categories, but it is often considered a German dialect by linguists.[13] The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown as some of them, especially the East Germanic languages, disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Some of the West Germanic languages also did not survive past the Migration Period, including Lombardic. As a result of World War II and subsequent mass expulsion of Germans, the German language suffered a significant loss of Sprachraum, as well as moribundity and extinction of several of its dialects. In the 21st century, German dialects are dying out[nb 3] as Standard German gains primacy.[14]


The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic, also known as Common Germanic, which was spoken in about the middle of the 1st millennium BC in Iron Age Scandinavia. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, notably has a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as "Grimm's law." Early varieties of Germanic entered history when the Germanic tribes moved south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC to settle in the area of today's northern Germany and southern Denmark.

Germanic umlaut only affected the and West Germanic languages (which represent all modern Germanic languages) but not the now-extinct East Germanic languages, such as Gothic, nor Proto-Germanic, the common ancestor of all Germanic languages.

North

The large inventory of vowel qualities is a later development, due to a combination of Germanic umlaut and the tendency in many Germanic languages for pairs of long/short vowels of originally identical quality to develop distinct qualities, with the length distinction sometimes eventually lost. Proto-Germanic had only five distinct vowel qualities, although there were more actual vowel phonemes because length and possibly nasality were phonemic. In modern German, long-short vowel pairs still exist but are also distinct in quality.

Proto-Germanic probably had a more general S-O-V-I word order. However, the tendency toward V2 order may have already been present in latent form and may be related to , an Indo-European law dictating that sentence clitics must be placed second.[44]

Wackernagel's Law

Germanic languages possess a number of defining features compared with other Indo-European languages.


Some of the best-known are the following:


Other significant characteristics are:


Some of the characteristics present in Germanic languages were not present in Proto-Germanic but developed later as areal features that spread from language to language:


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 Proto-Germanic (and in turn from Proto-Indo-European). Others, such as English, Swedish, and Afrikaans, have moved toward a largely analytic type.

The lowering of /u/ to /o/ in initial syllables before /a/ in the following syllable: *budąbode, Icelandic boðs "messages" ("a-Umlaut", traditionally called Brechung)

"Labial umlaut" in unstressed medial syllables (the conversion of /a/ to /u/ and /ō/ to /ū/ before /m/, or /u/ in the following syllable)

[45]

The conversion of /ē1/ into /ā/ (vs. Gothic /ē/) in stressed syllables. In unstressed syllables, West Germanic also has this change, but North Germanic has shortened the vowel to /e/, then raised it to /i/. This suggests it was an areal change.

[46]

The raising of final /ō/ to /u/ (Gothic lowers it to /a/). It is kept distinct from the nasal /ǭ/, which is not raised.

The of /ai/ and /au/ to /ē/ and /ō/ in non-initial syllables (however, evidence for the development of /au/ in medial syllables is lacking).

monophthongization

The development of an intensified demonstrative ending in /s/ (reflected in English "this" compared to "the")

Introduction of a distinct ablaut grade in Class VII , while Gothic uses reduplication (e.g. Gothic haihait; ON, OE hēt, preterite of the Gmc verb *haitan "to be called")[47] as part of a comprehensive reformation of the Gmc Class VII from a reduplicating to a new ablaut pattern, which presumably started in verbs beginning with vowel or /h/[48] (a development which continues the general trend of de-reduplication in Gmc[49]); there are forms (such as OE dial. heht instead of hēt) which retain traces of reduplication even in West and North Germanic

strong verbs

The subgroupings of the Germanic languages are defined by shared innovations. It is important to distinguish innovations from cases of linguistic conservatism. That is, if two languages in a family share a characteristic that is not observed in a third language, that is evidence of common ancestry of the two languages only if the characteristic is an innovation compared to the family's proto-language.


The following innovations are common to the Northwest Germanic languages (all but Gothic):


The following innovations are also common to the Northwest Germanic languages but represent areal changes:


The following innovations are common to the West Germanic languages:


The following innovations are common to the Ingvaeonic subgroup of the West Germanic languages, which includes English, Frisian, and in a few cases Dutch and Low German, but not High German:


The following innovations are common to the Anglo-Frisian subgroup of the Ingvaeonic languages:

Common linguistic features[edit]

Phonology[edit]

The oldest Germanic languages all share a number of features, which are assumed to be inherited from Proto-Germanic. Phonologically, it includes the important sound changes known as Grimm's Law and Verner's Law, which introduced a large number of fricatives; late Proto-Indo-European had only one, /s/.


The main vowel developments are the merging (in most circumstances) of long and short /a/ and /o/, producing short /a/ and long /ō/. That likewise affected the diphthongs, with PIE /ai/ and /oi/ merging into /ai/ and PIE /au/ and /ou/ merging into /au/. PIE /ei/ developed into long /ī/. PIE long /ē/ developed into a vowel denoted as /ē1/ (often assumed to be phonetically [æː]), while a new, fairly uncommon long vowel /ē2/ developed in varied and not completely understood circumstances. Proto-Germanic had no front rounded vowels, but all Germanic languages except for Gothic subsequently developed them through the process of i-umlaut.


Proto-Germanic developed a strong stress accent on the first syllable of the root, but remnants of the original free PIE accent are visible due to Verner's Law, which was sensitive to this accent. That caused a steady erosion of vowels in unstressed syllables. In Proto-Germanic, that had progressed only to the point that absolutely-final short vowels (other than /i/ and /u/) were lost and absolutely-final long vowels were shortened, but all of the early literary languages show a more advanced state of vowel loss. This ultimately resulted in some languages (like Modern English) losing practically all vowels following the main stress and the consequent rise of a very large number of monosyllabic words.

List of Germanic languages

Language families and languages

List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents

Germanization

Anglicization

Germanic name

and its various subordinated articles

Germanic verb

Germanic placename etymology

German name

Isogloss

South Germanic languages

Basbøll, Hans; Jacobsen, Henrik Galberg (2003). . University Press of Southern Denmark. pp. 41–57. ISBN 9788778388261.

Take Danish, for Instance: Linguistic Studies in Honour of Hans Basbøll Presented on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, 12 July 2003

Bethge, Richard (1900). "Konjugation des Urgermanischen". In Ferdinand Dieter (ed.). Laut- und Formenlehre der altgermanischen Dialekte (2. Halbband: Formenlehre). Leipzig: Reisland.

(1972), "Indo-European ē in Germanic", Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Sprachforschung, 86 (1): 104–110

Cercignani, Fausto

(1979), "The Reduplicating Syllable and Internal Open Juncture in Gothic", Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Sprachforschung, 93 (11): 126–132

Cercignani, Fausto

Jacobs, Neil G. (2005). . Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521772150 – via Google Books.

Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction

Joos, Martin (1952). "The Medieval Sibilants". Language. 28 (2): 222–231. :10.2307/410515. JSTOR 410515.

doi

Schumacher, Stefan (2005), "'Langvokalische Perfekta' in indogermanischen Einzelsprachen und ihr grundsprachlicher Hintergrund", in Meiser, Gerhard; Hackstein, Olav (eds.), Sprachkontakt und Sprachwandel. Akten der XI. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, 17. – 23. September 2000, Halle an der Saale, Wiesbaden: Reichert

Todd, Malcolm (1992). The Early Germans. Blackwell Publishing.

Wang, Chuan-Chao; Ding, Qi-Liang; Tao, Huan; Li, Hui (2012). . Science. 335 (6069): 657. Bibcode:2012Sci...335..657W. doi:10.1126/science.1207846. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 22323803.

"Comment on "Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa""

Germanic Lexicon Project

Archived 8 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine of the same Germanic words in dozens of Germanic languages and 'dialects', including English accents, and compare instantaneously side by side

'Hover & Hear' pronunciations

Bibliographie der Schreibsprachen: Bibliography of medieval written forms of High and Low German and Dutch

(from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)

Swadesh lists of Germanic basic vocabulary words

—YouTube (14:06)

Germanic languages fragments