This is the fourth in a series of articles on the Indo-European language family and in this article we will be looking at the Germanic sub-family of the Indo-European language family.
Divisions
The Germanic language family is divided in to three main sub-divisions which are.
- East Germanic
- West Germanic
- North Germanic
Each of these however can be divided in to different sub-groups and not all of these divisions should be held to be totally absolute or neat and precise, for example Swedish and Danish would be placed under ‘east Scandinavian’ whilst Norwegian is placed under the ‘west Scandinavian category’ but some say some variants of Norwegian and Danish are closer to each other than to Swedish.
Related Articles :
1. Indo European language family
2. The Slavic language family
3. The Latin language family
1. East Germanic
East Germanic, like the dodo bird, is now unfortunately extinct. The most famous east Germanic language is ‘Gothic’ which was spoken by Germanic tribes in what are now various parts of Europe.
Other east Germanic languages include Vandalic and Burgundian.
‘Vandalic’ is the language of the east Germanic ethnic group that conquered Iberia including both parts of what is now Spain and Portugal and we have examples of various forms of Vandalic writing.
The name ‘Andalusia’ is said to be derived from ‘Vandalusia’ (land of the Vandals), and this nation even conquered north Africa and established a kingdom there.
The Goths and their various sub-groups such as the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals are definitely an interesting group because though not unified in total these related tribes conquered places as diverse as areas which now fall in modern Ukraine, Serbia, Tunisia, Portugal, Spain and so forth.
However we know little about their language.
2. West Germanic
The west Germanic languages.
a) Anglo-Frisian.
To know more about the development and evolution of modern English, please read these articles:
1. The history of the English language, part 1
2. The history of the English language, part 2
3. The history of the English language, part 3
The closest language to modern English is ‘Frisian’ which itself is divided in to different variants including West Frisian (spoken in the Netherlands), South Frisian spoken in northern Germany close to Denmark and Saterland Frisian spoken in another part of northern Germany.
‘Old Frisian’ which is different to modern Frisian in the way that old English is very different to modern English, however both ‘Old Frisian’ and ‘Old English’ are very similar.
A study on this subject has been carried out by Dutch professor Arjent Versloot, the PDF of which is available on this link.
‘Why Old Frisian is still quite Old’
Professor Versloot in his study informs us that the oldest manuscript in old Frisian was in 1200 CE. Now obviously this form of Frisian would naturally have been different to the version spoken centuries earlier when the Frisians and other Germanic tribes from the north sea region crossed the sea, and the language of the proto-English (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians) and their cousins across the north sea would originally have been one and the same and then changed more and more with the passage of time, until the modern era where Frisian and English are mutually unintelligible due to various factors including the influence of Dutch on Frisian and the influence of French on English as well as the removal of inflectional endings in English (some argue this is due to the old English trying to communicate with Norsemen in the north of England and dropping different inflectional endings on verbs to facilitate communication).
Here is a video on the lexical similarity between old English and old Frisian.
To hear what old Frisian sounded like, you can watch this reconstruction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6xgpg9fngo
What is interesting to note is how guttural old Frisian may have been and thus how guttural its close cousin/sibling old English may have been.
The English spoken by people in Scotland still has that guttural element phonetically much more than the heavily French-influenced English of London. Parts of Scotland are closer geographically to Scandinavia than they are to London, for instance the distance between Aberdeen in Scotland and Stavanger in Norway.
Here is a video on ‘Doric’ as spoken by someone in Aberdeen, northern Scotland. Bear in mind that even a few generations ago the Doric spoken in Scotland would probably have been even ‘stronger’ (i.e. different to ‘standard English’ and less influenced by its phonology).
This brings us to the ‘Anglo’ in the term ‘Anglo-Frisian’.
English is of course the biggest Germanic language of them all and the biggest (in terms of influence and global usage) in the world ever.
So a lot has been written about it, including three separate articles on its history and evolution the links to which are available above.
It changed from being close to old Frisian by:
a) Simplication of its grammar including the loss of inflectional endings and also cases.
b) A massive influx of French and Latin vocabulary in to English often for more official or formal purposes.
To clarify what ‘simplification of grammar means’. For instance we say:
I go, We go, You go, He/She/It goes, They go.
All of them are the same except for ‘He’, ‘She’ and ‘It’ where we add an ‘s’. This ‘s’ indicates we are talking about a third person singular. However old English rather than having an extra sound just for he/she/it, had countless different suffixes varying from gender, number and tense.
This is an issue of lots of discussion but the general consensus is that it was due to the Celto-Germanic peoples of the south of England trying to speak to the Nordic settlers in the north i.e. Old English and Old Norse being spoken by the two groups, that they removed some inflectional endings. So for example a hypothetical example.
The old English always say: He goes, She goes, It goes.
The Old Norse (a fictitious example) say: He goel, She goel, It goel.
The ‘s’ in old English and the ‘l’ in old Norse (in this imaginary example) would complicate matters so both of the would drop the ‘s’ and the ‘l’ and it would sound like:
He go, She go, It go. This in a nutshell is what some suspect happened.
The Anglic languages include:
English
Scots
and other forms of the language, some now extinct.
B) German and its dialects
In addition modern standard German or ‘Hochdeutsch’, there are various forms of German both in terms of modern dialects and older historic forms of the language.
After English it’s the second most important Germanic language.
“Low German” or Platt Deutsch is the group of dialects spoken in the north of Germany which are increasingly fading away due to modern education and urbanization and the rise of standard German. Dutch itself is a derivative form of ‘low German’. The Scandinavian languages were also heavily influenced by Low German in a manner that could be said to have steered the Nordic languages (Swedish, Danish etc) away from their original form and changed the language significantly especially in terms of lexis.
‘Platt Deutsch’ (flat/low German) was named such because in contrast to the areas where ‘high German’ originated from and were literally on higher land or altitude e.g the Alps mountains, the German spoken in north was spoken in the low-lying lands of northern German and extending in to the even more low-lying Netherlands
Modern standard German
As mentioned above standard German originates from the dialects of the south and the cementing of a national standard form of the language was part of the process of German unification culminating in 1871. It is often said that the ‘best’ pronunciation of the language originates from Hanover. Hanover can be said to the German language what Tours and Paris are to French, or north Castile is to Spanish i.e. places said to have the ‘best’ phonology of their national languages.
However while modern standard German may have originated from southern dialects, this does not mean that there are not strong regional dialects in Germany such as Bavarian. This is even more pronounced in Switzerland where the Swiss Germans fiercely proud of their separate identity take pride in their various regional dialects as a marker of their ‘distinctness’ and ‘Swiss-ness’.
However though Swiss Germans are still said to speak ‘German’ albeit a different form. The Dutch of the Netherlands now speak a different language.
c) The Netherlandic languages
The Netherlandic languages include Dutch and its various dialects such as Limburgish which itself is divided in to different dialects some specific to a town and which are mutually intelligible with the dialects of Platt Deutsch a few miles to the east in the villages across the border in Germany.
Other Netherlandic languages include Flemish, with the relationship between Dutch and Flemish being similar to that of:
Catalan – Valencian.
Moldavan -Romanian
Bulgarian – Macedonian.
That is to say often people from the bigger nation (Catalonia, Romania, Bulgaria) argue that the other language is merely the same language with a different branding. Flemish and Dutch are mutually intelligble.
Afrikaans however is not, though has a high level of intelligibility with Dutch of which it is either depending on your viewpoint a variant, relative or derivative e.g. Afrikaans has some words of ‘African’ words.
3. North Germanic
The Scandinavian languages all (except for Finnish which is not Indo-European) all fall under the category of ‘North Germanic’ and were mutually intelligible even a few centuries back. Naturally they started to diverge a process which is inevitable and why the English vernacular spoken in Sydney is different to that spoken in New York, you won’t be hearing a Sydneysider saying “You gotta problem punk? You wanna take it there?” (translation in standard English, “You have a problem idiot? Do you want a fight?) or a New Yorker saying: “I just wanna fair suck!” (translation: I want a fair opportunity chance).
These differences started to accumulate amongst these languages until they are now considered ‘separate’ languages.
Swedish: Language of Sweden, and the biggest north Germanic language. It has various dialects and certain Swedes often comment on the ‘strange’ accent of people in the Skane region of southern Sweden commenting on how ‘Danish’ they sound, only natural given that Malmo is closer to Copenhagen (20 minutes at most) than to Stockholm.
Danish: Language of Denmark which at times ruled Norway and parts of Sweden and of course England too! It has various dialects such as Jysk. Some forms of English in the north are influenced lexically and phonetically even today by the Danes who used to rule England e.g. the ‘Geordie’ dialect of English has words which are essentially the same as Danish e.g. ‘bairn’ for child.
Both Swedish and Danish are said to be members of the east Scandinavian sub-group and were influenced by low German a few centuries ago.
Icelandic: The closest language to the old Norse and unlike Swedish and Danish not affected by the low German spoken during the period of the Hanseatic league, however it’s also the smallest.
Norwegian: Norwegian has a literary form and a spoken form called Bokmal and Nynorsk respectively.
So this is a very brief overview of the Germanic language family which originated from Proto-Indo-European and then over time fragmented in to different languages, some lost to history forever such as Gothic and some thriving and growing every second such as English. A tale of two great contrasts. The various Germanic peoples of the past be they the Vikings, the Normans, the Visigoths, Vandals, the colonial English fought, plundered, settled, built in lands as diverse as Greenland, Sicily, Crimea, Tunisia, north America, South Africa, Indonesia and many other places.
Let us know what you think or if you have any questions in the comments section below!