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The Proto-Germanic language developed in southern Scandinavia (Denmark, south Sweden and southern Norway) and the northern-most part of Germany in Schleswig Holstein and northern Lower Saxony, the Urheimat (original home) of the Germanic tribes.
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- History
- Family Tree
- Comparison of Phonological and Morphological Features
- Phonology
- Morphology
- West Germanic Vocabulary
- Bibliography
Origins and characteristics
The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. In some cases, their exact relation was difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, so that some individual varieties have been difficult to classify. This is especially true for the unattested Jutish language; today, most scholars classify Jutish as a West Germanic variety with several features of North Germanic. Until the late 20th century, some scholars claimed that...
Validity of West Germanic as a subgroup
Since at least the early 20th century, a number of morphological, phonological, and lexical archaisms and innovations have been identified as specifically West Germanic. Since then, individual Proto-West Germanic lexemes have also been reconstructed. Yet, there was a long dispute if these West Germanic characteristics had to be explained with the existence of a West Germanic proto-language or rather with Sprachbund effects. Hans Frede Nielsen's 1981 study Old English and the Continental Germa...
The reconstruction of Proto-West-Germanic
Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic morphological paradigms and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West-Germanic morphological forms or lexemes. The first comprehensive reconstruction of the Proto-West-Germanic language was published in 2013 by Wolfram Euler, followed in 2014 by the study of Donald Ringeand Ann Taylor.
Divisions between subfamilies of continental Germanic languages are rarely precisely defined; most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialectsbeing mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.
The following table shows a list of various linguistic features and their extent among the West Germanic languages, organized roughly from northwest to southeast. Some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages. The following table shows some comparisons of consonant development in the respective diale...
The existence of a unified Proto-West-Germanic language is debated. Features which are common to West Germanic languages may be attributed either to common inheritance or to areal effects. The phonological system of the West Germanic branching as reconstructed is mostly similar to that of Proto-Germanic, with some changes in the categorization and ...
Nouns
The noun paradigms of Proto-West Germanic have been reconstructed as follows:
The following table compares a number of Frisian, English, Scots, Yola, Dutch, Limburgish, German and Afrikaans words with common West Germanic (or older) origin. The grammatical gender of each term is noted as masculine (m.), feminine (f.), or neuter (n.) where relevant. Other words, with a variety of origins: Note that some of the shown similarit...
Adamus, Marian (1962). On the mutual relations between Nordic and other Germanic dialects.Germanica Wratislavensia 7. 115–158.Bammesberger, Alfred (1984). Der indogermanische Aorist und das germanische Präteritum [The Indo-European aorist and the Germanic past tense], in: Languages and Cultures. Studies in Honor of Edgar...Bammesberger, Alfred (Ed.) (1991). Old English Runes and their Continental Background.Heidelberg: Winter.Bammesberger, Alfred (1996). The Preterite of Germanic Strong Verbs in Classes Fore and Five, in "North-Western European Language Evolution" 27, 33–43.People also ask
Where are Germanic languages spoken?
Are Germanic languages Indo-European or Proto-Germanic?
Is Germanic a Germanic language?
What is the difference between Proto-Germanic and Germanic parent language?
The Germanic parent language (GPL), also known as Pre-Germanic Indo-European (PreGmc) or Pre-Proto-Germanic (PPG), is the stage of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family that was spoken c. 2500 BC – c. 500 BC, after the branch had diverged from Proto-Indo-European but before it evolved into Proto-Germanic.
Early Germanic culture was the culture of the early Germanic peoples. Largely derived from a synthesis of Proto-Indo-European and indigenous Northern European elements, the Germanic culture started to exist in the Jastorf culture that developed out of the Nordic Bronze Age.
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family.
