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Information about West Germanic Languages

West Germanic
Geographic
distribution:		 Originally between the Rhine, Alps, Elbe, and North Sea; today worldwide
Genetic
classification:		 }}
Subdivisions:
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest branch of the Germanic family of languages and include languages such as German, Yiddish, English and Frisian, as well as Dutch and Afrikaans. The other branches of the Germanic languages are the North and East Germanic languages.

History

Enlarge picture
The expansion of the Germanic tribes 750 BC – AD 1 (after the Penguin Atlas of World History 1988):      Settlements before 750BC      New settlements until 500BC      New settlements until 250BC      New settlements until AD 1

Origins and characteristics

The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups, West, East and North Germanic.[1] 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 Western group presumably formed as a variety of Proto-Germanic in the late Jastorf culture (ca. 1st century BC). The West Germanic group is characterized by a number of phonological and morphological innovations not found in North and East Germanic, such as:[2]
  • The loss of w after ng
  • Gemination of consonants (except r) before j
  • Replacement of the 2nd person singular preterite ending -t with -i
  • Short forms of the verbs for "stand" and "go"
  • The development of a gerund
Nevertheless, many scholars doubt whether the West Germanic languages descend from a common ancestor later than Proto-Germanic, that is, they doubt whether a "Proto-West Germanic" ever existed.[2] Rather, some have argued that after East Germanic broke off from the group, the remaining Germanic languages, the Northwest Germanic languages, divided into four main dialects:[3] North Germanic, and the three groups conventionally called "West Germanic", namely
  1. North Sea Germanic (Ingvaeonic, ancestral to Anglo-Frisian and Low Saxon)
  2. Elbe Germanic (Irminonic, ancestral to High German)
  3. Weser-Rhine Germanic (Istvaeonic, ancestral to Old Frankish)
Evidence for this view comes from a number of linguistic innovations found in both North Germanic and West Germanic,[2] including:
  • The retraction of Proto-Germanic ǣ to ā
  • The development of umlaut
  • The rhotacism of z to r
  • The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this
Under this view, the properties that the West Germanic languages have in common separate from the North Germanic languages are not inherited from a "Proto-West-Germanic" language, but rather spread by language contact among the Germanic languages spoken in central Europe, not reaching those spoken in Scandinavia.

Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand, and by the second Germanic sound shift on the continent on the other.

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 the Old English inflexional system that marked the onset of the Middle English period 12th century.

The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages. By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South (the Walliser dialect being the southernmost surviving German dialect) to Northern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are considered German, they are not mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, while the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift.

Modern variants

Of modern German varieties the north German Low Saxon is the one that most resembles modern English. The district of 'Angeln' (or Anglia), from which the name "English" derives, is in the extreme north of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. Saxony lies further to the south. The Anglo-Saxons, two Germanic tribes, were a combination of a number of peoples from northern Germany and the Jutland Peninsula.

Enlarge picture
The Germanic languages in Europe are divided into North (blue) and West Germanic (green and orange) Languages      Low Franconian and Low German      High German      Insular Anglo-Frisian (English, Scots)      Continental Anglo-Frisian      East North Germanic      West North Germanic      Line dividing the North and West Germanic languages.

Family tree

Main article: List of West Germanic languages
Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.

References

1. ^ Hawkins, John A. (1987). "Germanic languages", in Bernard Comrie: The World's Major Languages. Oxford University Press, 68–76. ISBN 0-19-520521-9. 
2. ^ Robinson, Orrin W. (1992). Old English and Its Closest Relatives. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-2221-8. 
3. ^ Kuhn, Hans (1955–56). "Zur Gliederung der germanischen Sprachen". Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 66: 1–47. 


Modern Germanic languages
Afrikaans | Alemannic | Danish | Dutch | English | Faroese | Frisian | German | Icelandic |
Limburgish | Low German | Luxembourgish | Norwegian | Scots | Swedish | Yiddish
A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language. As with biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics.
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The Anglo-Frisian languages are a subdivision of the Germanic Languages      Dutch (West Germanic)
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Low Franconian is any of several West Germanic languages spoken in the Netherlands, northern Belgium, Suriname, South Africa, Namibia and north-western Germany descended from Old Frankish.
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Low German (also called Niederdeutsch, Plattdeutsch or Plattdüütsch) is a name for the regional language varieties of the West Germanic languages spoken mainly in Northern Germany where it is officially called Niederdeutsch
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The High German languages are a subdivision of the West Germanic Languages     
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Germanic languages are a group of related languages constituting a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all languages comprising this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the latter mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age Northern Europe.
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See Language (journal) for the linguistics journal.


A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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German language (Deutsch, ] (help info ) ) is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages.
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Yiddish}}} 
Writing system: uses a Hebrew-based alphabet 
Official status
Official language of: Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia (de jure only); officially recognized minority language in Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel and Moldova
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English}}} 
Writing system: Latin (English variant) 
Official status
Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng  
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Frisian}}} 
Writing system: Latin alphabet 
Official status
Official language of: Netherlands
Regulated by: Fryske Akademy
Language codes
ISO 639-1: fy
ISO 639-2: fry
ISO 639-3: variously:
fry
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Dutch}}} 
Writing system: Latin alphabet (Dutch variant) 
Official status
Official language of:  Aruba
 Belgium
 European Union
 European Union
 Netherlands Antilles
 Suriname
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Afrikaans}}} 
Official status
Official language of:
The template is . Please use instead.
This usage is deprecated. Please replace it with .
'''The template is deprecated. Please use instead.
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North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the East Germanic languages.
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East Germanic languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages in the Germanic family. The only East Germanic language of which texts are known is Gothic; other languages that are assumed to be East Germanic include Vandalic, Burgundian, and Crimean Gothic.
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East Germanic languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages in the Germanic family. The only East Germanic language of which texts are known is Gothic; other languages that are assumed to be East Germanic include Vandalic, Burgundian, and Crimean Gothic.
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North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the East Germanic languages.
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Migration Period, also called Barbarian Invasions or Völkerwanderung, is a name given by historians to a human migration which occurred within the period of roughly AD 300–700 in Europe,[1]
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Proto-Germanic}}} 
Writing system: Elder Futhark
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: gem
ISO 639-3: —

Proto-Germanic (or Common Germanic
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Jastorf culture is an Iron Age material culture in what is now north Germany, spanning the 6th to 1st centuries BC, forming the southern part of the Pre-Roman Iron Age
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The 1st century BC started the first day of 100 BC and ended the last day of 1 BC. It is considered part of the Classical era, epoch, or historical period. An alternative name for this century is the last century BC.
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For the journal, see .
Phonology (Greek φωνή (phōnē), voice, sound + λόγος (lógos), word, speech, subject of discussion), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a
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For other uses, see Morphology.
Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.
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gemination occurs when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant.

Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Finnish and Luganda.
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In linguistics, “gerund” is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages:
  • As applied to English, it refers to what might be called a verb's action noun, which is one of the uses of the -ing form.

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Northwest Germanic is a proposed grouping of the Germanic dialects. It does not challenge the late 19th-century tri-partite division of the Germanic dialects into North Germanic, West Germanic and East Germanic, but proposes additionally that North and West Germanic remained as a
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Ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that would fork into Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon and according to some the local dialect of West-Flanders.
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Low Saxon may refer to:
  • Of or relating to Lower Saxony
  • Any West Low German speech variety
  • The Northern Low Saxon speech varieties
  • Especially in the Netherlands, any Low German speech variety – see also Dutch Low Saxon

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Irminones, also referred to as Herminones or Hermiones, were a group of early Germanic tribes settling in the Elbe watershed and by the 1st century AD expanding into Bavaria, Swabia and Bohemia.
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The High German languages are a subdivision of the West Germanic Languages     
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