2. Brief Characteristics of Germanic Languages

Germanic languages have resulted from individual development of Western Indo-European branch of dialects whose speakers had inhabited the shores of the Northern and Baltic Seas since the 3^rd millennium BC.

The speakers of the earliest form of a distinct Germanic branch of Indo-European appear to have inhabited an area covering parts of what are now Denmark and southern Sweden. From their early homeland in the southern parts of Scandinavia the speakers of Germanic carried it in various directions over succeeding centuries. The process began about the 3^rd century BC and was still active when the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain towards the middle of the 1^st millennium AD. Increasingly differentiated forms of Germanic developed as different groups of speakers became more firmly separated from one another. At the beginning of AD Germanic tribes occupied vast territories in western, central and northern Europe. Three groups of Germanic peoples gradually detached themselves from the previously united Germanic tribal cluster and in the process brought into being three separate forms of Germanic language.

2.1. Classification of Germanic Languages

It has long been common for linguists to speak in terms of a fundamental three-way division of the Germanic speech community into an East Germanic part, a North Germanic part and a West Germanic part, which includes Old English.

Table 1.1

Germanic Languages

	East Germanic	North Germanic	West Germanic
Old Germanic languages	Gothic	Old Norse (Old Scandinavian)	Anglian, Frisian, Jutish, Saxon, Franconian, High German
(now extinct)	Burgundian	Old Icelandic	(Alemanic, Thüringian,
			Swabian, Bavarian)
		Old Norwegian	Old English
		Old Danish	Old Saxon
		Old Swedish	Old High German
			Old Dutch
Modern Germanic	No living languages	Icelandic Norwegian	English German
languages		Danish	Netherlandish
		Swedish	Afrikaans
		Faroese	Yiddish
			Frisian

The principal East Germanic language is Gothic. At the beginning of our era the Goths lived on a territory from the Vistula to the shores of the Black Sea. For some time the Goths played a prominent part in European history, making extensive conquests in Italy and Spain. In that area, however, their language was soon replaced by Latin, and even elsewhere it did not live for long.

North Germanic is found in Scandinavia and Denmark. Runic inscriptions from the 3^rd century preserve the earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form the common Scandinavian language is spoken of as Old Norse. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: the eastern group including Swedish and Danish, and the western group including Norwegian and Icelandic.

West Germanic is the group of languages to which English belongs. In early times we distinguish Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. The last two are closely related and constitute a special Anglo-Frisian subgroup. Old Saxon has become an essential constituent of modern Low German or Plattdeutsch; Old Low Franconian, with some mixture of Frisian and Saxon elements, is the basis of modern Dutch in Holland and Flemish in northern Belgium; and Frisian survives in the Dutch province of Friesland, in a small part of Schleswig, in the islands along the coast, etc.

Germanic tribes spoke a range of dialects and interacted with speakers of other varieties of their own language, as well as with people speaking quite different languages, namely the Celtic languages of the native British population, and the form of Latin which many of those people seem to have used under the recently ended Roman governance of Britain.