Germanic languages

The Germanic languages make one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) group of tongues, spoken by the Germanic peoples who dwelled north and east along the borders of the Roman Empire. These tongues share many markers which they have in common, and which no other tongue has; of these the best known is the sound shift known as Grimm's law.

Writing

Some early Germanic languages made runic alphabets of their own, but use of these alphabets was comparatively limited. East Germanic languages were written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible into Gothic. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic tongue began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters.

In addition to the standard Latin alphabet, various Germanic languages use a variety of accent marks and extra letters, including umlauts, the ess-tsett (ß), Ø, Æ, Å, ð, ȝ from Gaelic, and þ and ᚹ, from runes. Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet. Historic printed German is frequently set in a distinctive typeface called Fraktur.

Linguistic Markers

Some of the tell-tale marks of Germanic roots are:

1. The levelling of the IE tense system into past and present (or common)
2. The use of a dental ending (/d/ or /t/) instead of switching vowels (ablaut) to show past tense.
3. Having two distinct types of verb conjugation: weak (regular) and strong (irregular). English has 161 strong verbs; all are of English birth.
4. The use of strong and weak adjectives. Modern English adjectives don't change except for comparative and superlative; this was not the case with Old English, where adjectives were inflected differently depending on whether they were preceded by an article or demonstrative, or not.
5. The sound shift known as Grimm's Law.
6. A great many non-IE roots. There are many Germanic roots that are not found in other IE tongues. These include words for everyday deeds such as "bite" and "chew" and all words about ships and the sea, except "boat". These roots may have been borrowed from the so-called Battle-axe people.
7. The shifting of stress onto the root of the stem. Though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what's added to them. This is perhaps the most important change.

Family tree

All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic. Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form continuous clines, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.

Mentioned here are only the principal or unusual dialects; individual articles linked to below contain larger family trees. For example, many Low Saxon dialects are discussed on Low Saxon besides just Standard Low Saxon and Plautdietsch.

• West Germanic
  • High German
    • German
      • Upper German
        • Swiss German, Austrian, etc
        • Alemán Coloneiro (spoken in Venezuela)
        • Lombardic (extinct)
        • Hutterite German (aka "Tirolean")
      • Middle German
        • Standard German (Hochdeutsch)
        • Luxembourgeois
        • Frankish
          • Old French - became French
          • Pennsylvania German (spoken by the Amish and other groups in southeastern Pennsylvania)
  • Low German
    • Low Franconian
      • Dutch
      • Afrikaans (with a significant influx of vocabulary from other languages)
    • Frisian
    • Low Saxon
      • Standard Low Saxon
      • Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German)
    • English (descending from Anglo-Saxon)
      • Modern Scots
    • East Germanic
      • East Low German
• North Germanic (descending from Old Norse):
  • West (Insular) Scandinavian
    • Icelandic
    • Faroese
    • Norn (extinct)
    • Norwegian Nynorsk (disputed, strong continental (Danish) influence)
  • East (Continental) Scandinavian
    • Danish
      • Burgundian (extinct-ancient language of Bornholm and shared origin with Scanian language).
      • Norwegian (Norwegian Bokmål)
    • Swedish
      • Gothic (extinct-diverged from Geats throughout their emigration to Eastern Europe).
        • Crimean Gothic (extinct in the 1800s, and was a dialect stretched from Gothic)
      • Vandalic, of the Vandals or Wends who lived in Vendel, Sweden, originally, before sharing similar fate of acculturization into the Slavic peoples like the Rus after them.

Comparison of Selected Terms

Please add to this table.

Afrikaans	Dutch	English	High German	Danish	Gothic	Icelandic	Swedish
vir	voor	for	für	for	faur		för
vry	vrij	free	frei	fri	freis		fri
my	mijn	my	mein	min	meins		min
hond	hond	dog / hound	Hund	hund	hunds	hundr	hund
lughawe	luchthaven	airport	Flughafen	lufthavn	-		flygplats
skool	school	school	Schule	skole			skola
sleg	slecht	bad	schlecht	slet	ubils		dålig
eggenoot	echtgenoot	husband	Ehemann	ægtemand			man
saam	samen	together	zusammen	tilsammen	samana		tillsammans
aksie	actie	action	Aktion	aktion	waurstwei		aktion
voël	vogel	bird / fowl	Vogel	fugl	fugls		fågel
asseblief	alstublieft	please	bitte		jabai wileis
goeienaand	goedenavond	good evening	guten Abend	god aften			god kväll
oop	open	open	offen	åben	us-lukan		öppen
vrou	vrouw	woman	Frau	frue / kvinde	qino		kvinna
water	water	water	Wasser	vand	wato		vatten

See also

• Language families and languages
• Non-Indo-European roots of Germanic languages

External links

• Proto-Germanic Dictionary
• Ethnologue Report for Germanic