Germanic languages

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Germanic languages are spoken natively by roughly 515 million people, mostly across Europe, Northern America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. One of them outgrew all the others. English now reaches an estimated 2 billion speakers, making it the most widely spoken language on Earth. Yet every Germanic language traces back to a single ancestor that left no written records of its own. Proto-Germanic was spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia and Iron Age Northern Germany, somewhere around the middle of the first millennium BC. From that one source came English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and dozens more. How did a family that began on the cold shores of the North Sea and the Baltic split into branches as different as Icelandic and Afrikaans? What links a witch in German to a witch in English, and why did some of these tongues vanish entirely? The answers run through sound laws, dying dialects, and a translation of the Bible made in the fourth century.

• 2. Three Branches

  ›

  West, East, and North Germanic: from their earliest attestation, the varieties split into these three groups. The exact relations between them are hard to pin down from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions. The western group would have formed in the late Jastorf culture. The eastern group may derive from the first-century variety of Gotland, which leaves southern Sweden as the original home of the northern group.

  The West Germanic branch is the larger by far, and it holds the three most widely spoken Germanic languages. English has around 360 to 400 million native speakers. German has over 100 million. Dutch has 24 million. The branch divides further into Anglo-Frisian, which includes English and all its variants, and Continental West Germanic, which includes German and Dutch along with their dialects.

  The North Germanic branch gathers the Scandinavian languages. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are in part mutually intelligible, with a combined total of about 20 million native speakers in the Nordic countries and an additional five million second-language speakers. Off to the west sit the more conservative languages, Faroese, Icelandic, and Elfdalian, which carry no significant Low German influence and have limited mutual intelligibility with their mainland cousins.

  The East Germanic branch is the one that disappeared. It included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic. The Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically absorbed by their neighbors by about the seventh century. Only one East Germanic tongue clung on. Crimean Gothic was spoken until the late eighteenth century in some isolated areas of Crimea.

• 3. Grimm's Law

  ›

  Compare three with Latin tres, two with Latin duo, do with Sanskrit dha-. Those mismatched consonants are no accident. They are the fingerprint of Grimm's law, the sound change that shifted the values of all the Indo-European stop consonants. Original sounds written as t, d, and a breathy d became Germanic th, t, and d in most cases. Together with a companion change called Verner's law, this introduced a large number of fricatives into a language family whose late Indo-European parent had only one, the s sound.

  Verner's law was sensitive to where the stress fell in a word. That sensitivity preserved remnants of the older, freer Proto-Indo-European accent even after Germanic developed a heavy stress on the first syllable of the root. The recognition of these two laws were seminal events in understanding that sound change is regular, not random.

  That insight built the comparative method, which forms the basis of modern historical linguistics. These sound shifts probably took place during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe, around 500 BC, the same rough window in which Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken.

• 4. Crushing The Vowels

  ›

  Strangiþō became strength. Aimaitijō became ant. Haubudą became head. The long Proto-Germanic words on the left were squeezed into the stubby English words on the right by one force: a strong stress that landed on the first syllable and triggered phonological reduction of every syllable after it. This is why modern English and German strike many ears as consonant-heavy languages, and why so much of English collapsed into monosyllables.

  Germanic umlaut worked the vowels from a different angle. When a high front segment like i or j followed in the next syllable, it reshaped the vowel before it, fronting back vowels and raising front ones. The marks ä, ö, and ü in German record exactly this. The same process echoes faintly in English alternations such as mouse and mice, goose and geese, old and elder, gold and gild.

  The family ended up vowel-rich. English carries around 11 to 12 vowels in most dialects, not counting diphthongs. Standard Swedish has 17 pure vowels. The Amstetten dialect of Bavarian German draws 13 distinctions among long vowels alone, one of the largest such inventories in the world. None of this was inherited whole. Proto-Germanic had only five distinct vowel qualities, and the riches came later from umlaut and from long and short pairs drifting apart in quality.

• 5. Word Order And Weak Verbs

  ›

  Here comes the sun. Over went the boat. Out ran the cat. These English sentences put something before the verb and the subject after it, a faint survival of a pattern called verb-second, or V2 word order, which is uncommon across the world's languages. The rule demands that exactly one phrase precede the finite verb, so when an adverb or prepositional phrase comes first, the subject must follow the verb directly. English keeps this only in scraps; the other modern Germanic languages use it far more.

  The Germanic verb also got simpler in one respect and cleverer in another. The many tense and aspect combinations of the Indo-European verb collapsed into just two, present and past. To mark the past, a new class of weak verbs arose that used a dental suffix, a d, t, or th sound, instead of the older vowel alternation. That suffix is often assumed to come from the verb to do. The vast majority of verbs in all Germanic languages are now weak; the survivors that still change their vowel, like the ablaut verbs, are the strong ones.

  Germanic also developed two sets of adjective endings, the so-called strong and weak inflections, which marked whether a noun phrase was definite. The definite endings derived from n-stem nouns, while the indefinite ones blended pronoun endings with a vowel-stem adjective declension. This distinction has been lost in modern English but survives to various degrees in all the other Germanic languages, and a similar split arose independently in the Balto-Slavic languages.

• 6. Conservative And Progressive

  ›

  Icelandic has kept the grammar of Old Norse virtually unchanged. While the mainland Scandinavian languages drifted apart, the island language to the west held its ground, preserving four noun cases, three genders, and well-marked verbs. German, to a lesser extent, also guards much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from Proto-Germanic.

  English and Afrikaans sit at the opposite pole, with almost no remaining inflectional morphology. The engine of that loss was the same heavy initial stress that crushed the vowels: it wore away the unstressed endings until the cases and agreements faded. By contrast, the Balto-Slavic languages largely kept the Indo-European pitch accent and so preserved much of the inherited morphology. In Afrikaans the strong-verb pattern has vanished except in fossilised forms such as the past participle gedaan.

  The split runs deep enough that two languages both called German can barely understand each other. The High German consonant shift, the second sound shift, divided the continent, completing in the southernmost varieties like Highest Alemannic while leaving the northern varieties untouched. Highest Alemannic in the south and Northern Low Saxon in the north are both counted as German, yet they are hardly mutually intelligible.

• 7. Words On Stone And Skin

  ›

  The Negau helmet carries a single instance of the earliest Germanic writing, inscribed in the second century BC using an Old Italic script. After that, around the first to second century AD, speakers of early Germanic varieties developed the Elder Futhark, an early form of the runic alphabet. Those first runic inscriptions are mostly personal names and hard to interpret. The Vimose inscriptions include some of the oldest datable Germanic inscriptions, starting around 160 AD.

  The earliest coherent Germanic text that survives is a fourth-century Gothic translation of the New Testament by Ulfilas, a bishop who created the Gothic alphabet for the task. West Germanic surfaces in Old Frankish, or Old Dutch, through the fifth-century Bergakker inscription, and in Old English, whose oldest texts date to 650. North Germanic appears only in scattered runic inscriptions, as Proto-Norse, until it became Old Norse by about 800. Longer runic inscriptions survive on the Eggjum stone and the Rök stone from the eighth and ninth centuries.

  Latin letters arrived with Christian priests and monks, who wrote their native Germanic varieties with slightly modified Latin script. Runes did not surrender at once. Throughout the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, runic writing stayed in common use in Scandinavia alongside the state's Latin script. It faded mainly once the printing press arrived, though it survived regionally in the Swedish province of Dalarna as the Dalecarlian runes.

• 8. The Living Map

  ›

  English is an official language across an enormous spread of countries, from Belize, Canada, and Nigeria to Singapore, India, and Papua New Guinea, and the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. The collapse of Old English grammar was hastened by Viking settlers of the Danelaw, whose contact with the Anglo-Saxons left traces in the language. That, combined with Romance Old French vocabulary after the Norman Conquest, produced Middle English from the twelfth century.

  The smaller West Germanic languages map onto specific corners of the world. Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch carried by the Afrikaners of South Africa, counts over 7.1 million native speakers and serves as a lingua franca of Namibia. Yiddish, once the native language of some 11 to 13 million people in pre-World War II Europe, now has roughly 1.5 million speakers. Scots claims over 1.5 million speakers in the Lowlands, the Northern Isles, and parts of Ulster, while the Frisian languages hold over 500,000 along the southern fringes of the North Sea.

  The Nordic languages carry their own borrowings and overseas reach. Since the Middle Ages, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian have been strongly shaped by Middle Low German, whose words make up about 30 to 60 percent of their vocabularies by various estimates. Danish remains a lingua franca and language of education in Greenland, where it was one of the official languages until 2009. The SIL Ethnologue counts 48 living Germanic languages in all, 41 in the Western branch and six in the Northern, a family still branching out from those Iron Age coasts.