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Germanic languages
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   The 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. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law. Early Germanic varieties enter history with the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire from the 2nd century.
   The largest Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 400 and 100 million native speakers respectively. The group consists of other major languages, such as Dutch with 22 million and Afrikaans with over 16 million speakers; and the North Germanic languages including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese with a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The SIL Ethnologue lists 53 different Germanic languages.

Characteristics

Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:
  1. The leveling of the IE tense and aspect system into the present tense and past tense (also called preterite).
  2. A large class of verbs that use a dental suffix (/d/ or /t/) instead of vowel alternation (Indo-European ablaut) to indicate past tense. These are called the Germanic weak verbs; the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the Germanic strong verbs.
  3. The use of so-called strong and weak adjectives: different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives depending on the definiteness of the noun phrase. (Modern English adjectives don't inflect at all, except for the comparative and superlative; this wasn't the case in Old English, where adjectives were inflected differently depending on whether they were preceded by an article or demonstrative.)
  4. The consonant shift known as Grimm's Law. (The consonants in High German have shifted farther yet by the High German consonant shift.)
  5. A number of words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families, but variants of which appear in almost all Germanic languages. See Germanic substrate hypothesis.
  6. The shifting of stress accent onto the root of the stem and later to the first syllable of the word. (Though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what is added to them.)
Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than do some other language families such as the Romance or Slavic languages. Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend towards analyticity. Some, like German, Dutch and Icelandic, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language. Others, like English, Swedish and Afrikaans have moved towards a largely analytic type.
   Another characteristic of Germanic languages is verb second or V2 word order, which is quite uncommon cross-linguistically. This feature is shared by all modern Germanic languages except English, which appears to have had V2 earlier in its history but has largely replaced the structure with an overall SVO structure.

Writing

The earliest evidence of Germanic comes from names recorded in the 1st century by Tacitus (especially from his work Germania), but the earliest Germanic writing occurs in a single instance in the 2nd century BC on the Negau helmet. From roughly the 2nd century AD, certain speakers of early Germanic varieties developed the Elder Futhark, an early form of the runic alphabet. Early runic inscriptions are also largely limited to personal names, and difficult to interpret. The Gothic language was written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible in the 4th century. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic varieties began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters. However, throughout the Viking Age, runic alphabets remained in common use in Scandinavia.
   In addition to the standard Latin alphabet, various Germanic languages use a variety of accent marks and extra letters, including umlauts, the ß (Eszett), IJ, Ø, Æ, Å, Ä, Ö, Ð, Ȝ, and Þ and Ƿ, from runes. Historic printed German is frequently set in blackletter typefaces (for example fraktur or schwabacher).

History

All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic, united by their having been subjected to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law. These took place probably during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe from ca. 500 BC, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age.
   From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three groups, West, East and North Germanic. 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 6th century Lombardic language, for instance, may constitute an originally either North or East Germanic variety that became assimilated to West Germanic as the Lombards settled at the Elbe. The Western group would have formed in the late Jastorf culture, the Eastern group may be derived from the 1st century variety of Gotland (see Old Gutnish), leaving southern Sweden as the original location of the Northern group . The earliest coherent Germanic text preserved is the 4th century Gothic translation of the New Testament by Ulfilas. Early testimonies of West Germanic are in Old High German (scattered words and sentences 6th century, coherent texts 9th century), Old English (coherent texts 10th century). North Germanic is only attested in scattered runic inscriptions, as Proto-Norse, until it evolves into Old Norse by about 800. Longer runic inscriptions survive from the 8th and 9th centuries (Eggjum stone, Rök stone), longer texts in the Latin alphabet survive from the 12th century (Íslendingabók), and some skaldic poetry held to date back to as early as the 9th century.
   By about the 10th century, the varieties had diverged enough to make intercomprehensibility difficult. 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 Old English grammar that resulted in Middle English from the 12th century.
   The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration period. The Burgundians, Goths and Vandals became linguistically assimilated to their respective neighbors by about the 7th century, with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the 18th century.
   During the early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand, and by the High German consonant shift on the continent on the other, resulting in Upper German and Low Saxon, with graded intermediate Central German varieties. By Early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North, and although both extremes are considered German, they're hardly mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, while the northern varieties remained unaffected by the consonant shift.
   The North Germanic languages, on the other hand, remained more unified, with the larger languages largely retaining mutual intelligibility into modern times.

Classification

Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form continuous clines, with adjacent varieties being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.

Diachronic

General Note: The table shows the succession of the significant historical stages of each language (vertically), and their approximate groupings in subfamilies (horizontally). Horizontal sequence within each group doesn't imply a measure of greater or lesser similarity.
Iron Age
500 BC–AD 200		 Proto-Germanic
East Germanic West Germanic North Germanic
South Germanic Anglo-Frisian
Migration period
AD 200–700		 Gothic, Lombardic1   Old Frankish Old Saxon Old Frisian Old English Proto-Norse
Vandalic, Burgundian, Old High German
Early Middle Ages
700–1100		 Old Low Franconian Runic Old West Norse Runic Old East Norse
Middle Ages
1100–1350		 Middle High German Middle Dutch Middle Low German Middle English Old Icelandic Old Norwegian Early Old Danish Early Old Swedish Early Old Gutnish
Late Middle Ages2
1350–1500		 Early New High German Middle English Early Scots Late Old Icelandic Old Faroese Old Norn Middle Norwegian Late Old Danish Late Old Swedish Late Old Gutnish
Early Modern Age
1500–1700		 Crimean Gothic Low Franconian varieties, including Dutch Middle Frisian Early Modern English Middle Scots Icelandic Faroese Norn Norwegian Danish Swedish Gutnish
Modern Age
1700 to present		 all extinct High German varieties Low Saxon varieties Frisian varieties English varieties Scots varieties extinct3 extinct3
Note 1: There are conflicting opinions on the classification of Lombardic. Contrary to its isolated position in the table above, it has also been classified as close to either Upper German or Old Saxon. See the article on the Lombardic language for more information. Note 2: Late Middle Ages refers to the post Black Death period. Especially for the language situation in Norway this event was important. Note 3: The speakers of Norn were assimilated to speak the Modern Scots varieties, and the Gutnish language is today practically a dialect of Swedish.

Contemporary

Mentioned here are all the principal and some secondary contemporary varieties; individual articles linked to below may contain larger family trees. For example, many Low Saxon varieties are discussed on Low Saxon besides just Northern Low Saxon and Plautdietsch.
  • Proto-Germanic
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