Germanic Linguistics

 

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The Germanic Languages

The Germanic languages is a subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, which were spoken by about 420 million people in many parts of the world (chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere). All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest records. This suggests that they all derive from a still earlier common ancestor, which is traditionally referred to as Proto-Germanic and which is believed to have broken from the other Indo-European languages before 500 B.C. Although no writing in Proto-Germanic has survived, the language has been substantially reconstructed by using the oldest records that exist of the Germanic tongue.

ddr1.gif (6300 bytes)    The Linguistic Groups

The Germanic languages today are conventionally divided into three linguistic groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. This division had begun by the 4th century A.D. The East Germanic group, to which such dead languages as Burgundian, Gothic, and Vandalic belong, is now extinct. However, the oldest surviving literary text of any Germanic language is in Gothic.

The North Germanic languages, also called Scandinavian languages or Norse, include Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. They are spoken by about 20 million people, chiefly in Denmark, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. These modern North Germanic languages are all descendants of Old Norse and have several distinctive grammatical features in common. One is the adding of the definite article to the noun as a suffix. Thus “the book” in English is expressed in Swedish as boken, “book-the” (bok meaning “book” and -en meaning “the”). Also distinctive is a method of forming the passive voice by adding -s to the end of the verb or, in the case of the present tense, by changing the active ending -r to -s (-st in Icelandic). This is illustrated by the Swedish jag kaller, “I call”; jag kallas, “I am called”; jag kallade, “I called”; jag kallades, “I was called.”

The West Germanic languages are English, Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, German, and Yiddish. They are spoken by about 400 million people. Among the dead West Germanic languages are Old Franconian, Old High German, and Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) from which Dutch, German, and English respectively developed.

Distribution of Germanic Languages

West Germanic

English

443 Million Speakers

Britain, Ireland, United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, India, Philippines

German

118 Million Speakers

Germany, Austria, Switzerland, parts of Alsace-Lorraine

Dutch (including Flemish)

21 Million Speakers

Netherlands and Belgium

Afrikaans

10 Million Speakers

South Africa

Yiddish

5 Million Speakers

East and South Europe, United States

Frisian

1/2 Million Speakers

North Sea Coast—Holland to Schleswig-Holstein

 

North Germanic

Swedish

9 Million Speakers

Sweden, Finland

Danish

5 Million Speakers

Denmark

Norwegian

5 Million Speakers

Norway

Icelandic

251,000 Speakers

Iceland

Faeroese

47,000 Speakers

Faeroes Islands

 

East Germanic

Gothic

Dead language

Vandalic

Dead language

Burgundian

Dead language

Rugian

Dead language

Heruler

Dead language

ddr1.gif (6300 bytes)    Common Characteristics

Strong evidence for the unity of all the modern Germanic languages can be found in the phenomenon known as the first Germanic sound shift or consonant shift (also called Grimm's law), which set the Germanic subfamily apart from the other members of the Indo-European family. Consisting of a regular shifting of consonants in groups, the sound shift had already occurred by the time adequate records of the various Germanic languages began to be made in the 7th to 9th century. According to Grimm's law, certain consonant sounds found in the ancient Indo-European languages (such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit) underwent a change in the Germanic tongue. For example, the sounds p, d, t, and k in the former became f, t, th, and h respectively in the latter, as in Latin pater, English father; Latin dent, English tooth; and Latin cornu, English horn.

Before the 8th century a second shift of consonants took place in some of the West German dialects. For instance, under certain circumstances, d became t, and t became ß (ss) or z, as in English bread, Dutch brood, but German Brot; English foot, Dutch voet, but German Fuß; and English ten, Dutch tien, but German zehn. The dialects in which this second consonant shift took place were the High German dialects, so called because they were spoken in more mountainous areas. Standard modern German arose from these dialects. The West Germanic dialects not affected by the second shift were the Low German dialects of the Lowlands, from which Dutch and English evolved.

Also peculiar to the Germanic languages is the recessive accent, whereby the stress usually falls on the first or root syllable of a word, especially a word of Germanic origin. Another distinctive characteristic shared by the Germanic languages is the umlaut, which is a type of vowel change in the root of a word. It is demonstrated in the pairs foot (singular), feet (plural) in English; fot (singular), fötter (plural) in Swedish; and Kampf (singular), Kämpfe (plural) in German.

All Germanic languages have strong and weak verbs; that is, they form the past tense and past participle either by changing the root vowel in the case of strong verbs (as in English lie, lay, lain or ring, rang, rung; German ringen, rang, gerungen) or by adding as an ending -d (or -t) or -ed in the case of weak verbs (as in English care, cared, cared or look, looked, looked; German fragen, fragte, gefragt). Also typically Germanic is the formation of the genitive singular by the addition of -s or -es. Examples are English man, man's; Swedish hund, hunds; German Lehrer, Lehrers or Mann, Mannes. Moreover, the comparison of adjectives in the Germanic languages follows a parallel pattern, as in English: rich, richer, richest; German reich, reicher, (am) reichsten; and Swedish rik, rikare, rikast. Lastly, vocabulary furnished evidence of a common origin for the Germanic languages in that a number of the basic words in these languages are similar in form; however, while word similarity may indicate the same original source for a group of languages, it can also be a sign of borrowing.

Bibliography

See A. L. Streadbeck, A Short Introduction to Germanic Linguistics (1966); Antoine Meillet, General Characteristics of the Germanic Languages (tr. 1970); T. L. Markey, Germanic and Its Dialects (1977); H. F. Nielsen, The Germanic Languages (rev. ed. 1989)

Writing and Spelling

Aside from Gothic, for which Ulfilas invented an alphabet, before the year 600, no written Germanic existed except for a few single words and short sentences in runic characters. More of these have been found in Scandinavia and Britain than in Germany. After 600, when Christian monks tried to write the Germanic languages in Latin characters, they experienced many difficulties because Latin and Germanic sounds do not resemble one another very closely.

Written Dutch is fairly uniform in spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, but spoken Dutch has a number of dialects as well as an official spoken form. Written Dutch evolved from the Flemish spoken in Flanders and Brabant in the 15th century; modern spoken Dutch, however, grew out of the vernacular of the province of Holland.

Afrikaans arose from the Dutch spoken by the Boers, who emigrated from the Netherlands to South Africa in the 17th century. Its written form dates only from the mid-19th century. Its basic Dutch vocabulary has been greatly expanded with native African and English borrowings.

Yiddish, although it is not a national language, is spoken by Jews all over the world. It arose (c. 1100) out of a blend of a number of German dialects in the ghettos of Central Europe, and from there it spread to other parts of the world. Phonetically, Yiddish is closer to Middle High German than is modern German. Its vocabulary is basically German, but it has been enlarged by borrowings from Hebrew, Slavic, Romance languages, and English.

Vocabulary

Only about 25 percent of the vocabulary of modern Germanic languages can be traced directly back through West and North Germanic to Indo-European. Ninety percent of Gothic vocabulary is Indo-European. The pronouns (I, my, you), nouns of kinship (father, mother, brother), parts of the body (eye, ear, arm), domestic animals (hound, ox, steer), and common activities (build, bite, go, stand, sit, know) are such words. Some of the most common Germanic words, however, have baffled etymologists; these include such terms as broad, bring, dumb, hold, rain, drive, drink, and sea-terms such as sea, cliff, leak, among others.

Latin vocabulary and grammar have influenced the Germanic languages extensively. The most important Latin influences occurred during the Reformation and the rise of humanism (15th and 16th centuries). Many Greek words were also borrowed at that time. The great influence of French on English after the Norman invasion (1066) produced a hybrid language that is West Germanic in grammar and basic vocabulary, but is French in most words of five letters or more (Germanic: is, am, it, of, for, the this; French: senior, editor, ultimately). French culture and language have given hundreds of loan-words and related ideas to most other Germanic languages, although their effect is not as great as on English.

Within the Germanic languages extensive borrowing of vocabulary is evident. English words, for example, abound in present-day German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and most Scandinavian languages. Italian, Spanish, the Slavic languages, Arabic, and others have also enriched the Germanic vocabulary.

Morphology

The Germanic languages have two adjective declensions, a strong and a weak. The weak forms are used generally after articles, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive adjectives; the strong are used independently. The number of these forms is reduced greatly in Danish, Swedish, and Netherlandic. The comparison of adjectives and adverbs in Germanic differs from that in the Romance languages. Generally, -r and -st endings are added: long, longer, longest; Swedish, lang, langre, langst.

The eight cases of Indo-European nouns, adjectives, and pronouns were reduced to four, and sometimes even fewer, in Germanic. Free stress (accent) became recessive, and precise accent rules became dominant, with the first root syllable in Germanic carrying the stress. Umlauting, a process of modifying vowel sounds, took place extensively (man, men; foot, feet). A system of strong verbs developed as the result of vowel alternation (ablaut), as in sing, sang, sung, and a unique way of forming the past tense using weak verbs (jump, jumped) was created, probably by adding a form of did to the verb (I jump - did = I jumped). The number of strong verbs in Germanic is steadily being reduced, and the system does not seem to permit the creation of new strong verbs. Conversely, the number of weak verbs is increasing.

Bibliography

Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue (1990); A. B. Cook, Introduction to the English Language, Structure and History (1969); Einar Haugen, The Scandinavian Languages (1976); Otto Jesperson, Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin (1954); Winifred P. Lehmann, A Reader in Ninrteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics   (1962) and Historical Linguistics (1962);  W. B. Lockwood, An Informal History of the German Language, with Chapters on Dutch and Afrikaans, Frisian and Yiddish (1965); Antoine Meillet, General Characteristics of the Germanic Languages, trans. by William Dismukes (1970); William G. Moulton, The Sounds of English and German (1962); Siegfried Muller, The World’s Living Languages (1964); Hans F. Nielsen, The Germanic Languages. rev. ed. (1989); Mario Pei, The Story of English (1967) and The World’s Chief Languages (1967); R. K. Seymour, A Bibliography of Word Formation in the Germanic Languages (1968); A. L. Streadbeck, A Short Introduction to Germanic Linguistics (1966); John T. Waterman, A History of the German Language (1966); Uriel and Beatrice Weinrich, Yiddish Language and Folklore: A Selective Bibliography (1959); J. M. Williams, Origins of the English Language (1975)

Grimm's law

Grimm's Law presents a principle of relationships in Indo-European languages, which was first formulated by Jakob Grimm in 1822 and is a continuing subject of interest and investigation to 20th-century linguists. It shows that a process—the regular shifting of consonants in groups—took place once in the development of English and the other Low German languages and twice in German and the other High German languages. The first sound shift, affecting both English and German, was from the early phonetic positions documented in the ancient, or classical, Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) to those still evident in the Low German languages, including English; the second shift affected only the High German languages (e.g., standard German).

To explain why the initial consonants of such words as Latin piscis, dentis, and fundus differ from those of their cognates fish, tooth, and bottom, Grimm’s law states that in prehistoric times (1) the Indo-European voiceless stops p, t, and k became the Germanic fricatives f, th, (e.g., the initial sounds of Latin pater, English father, German Vater, and in the middle of Latin frater, English brother, German Bruder) and Greek lower-case letter chi; (2) the voiced stops b, d, and g became the voiceless stops p, t, and k; and (3) the fricatives bh, dh, and gh became the voiced stops b, d, and g. Rasmus Rask came close to formulating these consonant shifts in 1814, but Jacob Grimm made the decisive breakthrough in the second edition of his Deutsche Grammatik (1822). Working from the first part of Grimm’s law, Karl Adolf Verner was able to trace subsequent developments of the Germanic fricatives f, th, and chi.

Indo-European

The Indo-European family of languages has more speakers than any other language family. It is estimated that approximately half the world's population speaks an Indo-European tongue as a first language. The Indo-European family is so named because at one time its individual members were prevalent mainly in an area between and including India and Europe, although not all languages spoken in this region were Indo-European. Today, however, the Indo-European languages have spread to every continent and a number of islands. It should be stressed that the term Indo-European describes language only and is not used scientifically in an ethnic or cultural sense. The languages classified as Indo-European are sufficiently similar to form one major linguistic division.

The characteristics Indo-European languages share with respect to vocabulary and grammar have led many scholars to postulate that they are all descended from an original parent language, called Proto-Indo-European, which is believed to have been spoken some time before 2000 B.C. Since there are no written records of Proto-Indo-European, it apparently was in use before writing was known to its speakers. Even its existence is an assumption, although a plausible one and the only really satisfactory explanation of the common features of the modern Indo-European languages. There has been much speculation as to the region where the speakers of Proto-Indo-European first lived and the nature of their culture, but nothing definite is known. One theory of the origin of the individual Indo-European languages suggests that as the ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European migrated or moved away from each other, losing contact, their language broke up into a number of tongues. These tongues later also split up still further, eventually giving rise to the many modern Indo-European languages. For a classification of Indo-European subfamilies, groups, subgroups, and individual languages, see accompanying table below. By studying the vocabulary and grammar of the various daughter languages of which there are records, scholars have tried to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European and infer some of its characteristics. It appears to have been highly inflected in a distinctive way. Apparently, it also had three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives; no less than six cases for the noun; agreement between adjectives and nouns; and a free accent (i.e., one that could be placed on any syllable).

The descendant languages have all tended to discard to a greater or lesser extent these features of the mother tongue and to become simplified. For example, they substitute increasingly the use of word order and prepositions for inflections to indicate the relationships of words in a sentence. There also exists among the Indo-European languages a similarity of basic words (such as words denoting kinship, numerals, and parts of the body) that points to a common origin. Different forms of writing for the various Indo-European languages used both in ancient and modern times include cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and a number of alphabets, among them the Devanagari, Greek, Roman, and Arabic scripts.

Bibliography

See also Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (tr. 1973); Philip Baldi, An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages (1983)

The Indo-European Family of Languages

 

Subfamily Group Subgroup Languages and Principal Dialects
Anatolian     Hieroglypic Hittite*, Hittite (Kanesian)*, Luwian*, Lycian*, Lydian*, Palaic*
Baltic     Latvian (Lettish), Lithuanian, Old Prussian*
Celtic Brythonic   Breton, Cornish*, Welsh
Celtic Continental   Gaulish*
Celtic Goidelic or Gaelic   Irish (Irish Gaelic), Manx*, Scottish Gaelic
Germanic East Germanic   Burgundian*, Gothic*, Vandalic*
Germanic North Germanic   Old Norse* (see Norse): Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish
Germanic West Germanic (see Grimm's law) High German German, Yiddish
Germanic West Germanic (see Grimm's law) Low German Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Flemish, Frisian, Plattdeutsch (see German language)
Greek     Aeolic*, Arcadian*, Attic*, Byzantine Greek*, Cyprian*, Doric*, Ionic*, KoinE*, Modern Greek
Indo-Iranian Dardic or Pisacha   Kafiri, Kashmiri, Khowar, Kohistani, Romany (Gypsy), Shina
Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan   Pali*, Prakrit*, Sanskrit*, Vedic*
Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan Central Indic Hindi, Hindustani, Urdu
Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan East Indic Assamese, Bengali, Bihari, Oriya
Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan Northwest Indic Punjabi, Sindhi
Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan Pahari Central Pahari, Eastern Pahari (Nepali), Western Pahari
Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan South Indic Marathi (including major dialect Konkani), Singhalese (Sinhalese)
Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan West Indic Bhili, Gujarati, Rajasthani (many dialects)
Indo-Iranian Iranian   Avestan*, Old Persian*
Indo-Iranian Iranian East Iranian Baluchi, Khwarazmian*, Ossetic, Pamir dialects, Pushtu (Afghan), Saka (Khotanese)*, Sogdian*, Yaghnobi
Indo-Iranian Iranian West Iranian Kurdish, Pahlavi (Middle Persian)*, Parthian*, Persian (Farsi), Tajiki
Italic (Non-Romance)   Faliscan*, Latin, Oscan*, Umbrian*
Italic Romance or Romanic Eastern Romance Italian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Sardinian
Italic Romance or Romanic Western Romance Catalan, French, Ladino, Portuguese, Provençal, Spanish
Slavic or Slavonic East Slavic   Belorussian (White Russian), Russian, Ukrainian
Slavic or Slavonic South Slavic   Bulgarian, Church Slavonic*, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian
Slavic or Slavonic West Slavic   Czech, Kashubian, Lusatian (Sorbian or Wendish), Polabian*, Polish, Slovak
Thraco-Illyrian     Albanian, Illyrian*, Thracian*
Thraco-Phrygian     Armenian, Grabar (Classical Armenian)*, Phrygian*
Tokharian (W China)     Tokharian A (Agnean)*, Tokharian B (Kuchean)*
* Asterisk indicates a dead language

 

 

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Last modified: June 16, 1999

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