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Beginning of the Common Era
- Proto-Germanic probably remained a fairly homogeneous speech community until the last four or five centuries before the beginning of the Common Era, when it divided into East and Northwest Germanic dialects; the latter subsequently split into North and West Germanic.
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Aug 22, 2024 · Scholars often divide the Germanic languages into three groups: West Germanic, including English, German, and Netherlandic ; North Germanic, including Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese; and East Germanic, now extinct, comprising only Gothic and the languages of the Vandals, Burgundians, and a few other tribes.
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Sometime after that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. By the 4th and 5th centuries the great migration set in. By the end of the 6th century, the area in which West Germanic languages were spoken, at least by the upper classes, had tripled compared to the year 400.
Germanic umlaut only affected the North and West Germanic languages (which represent all modern Germanic languages) but not the now-extinct East Germanic languages, such as Gothic, nor Proto-Germanic, the common ancestor of all Germanic languages.
Jul 18, 2024 · West Germanic languages, group of Germanic languages that developed in the region of the North Sea, Rhine-Weser, and Elbe. Out of the many local West Germanic dialects the following six modern standard languages have arisen: English, Frisian, Dutch (Netherlandic-Flemish), Afrikaans, German, and Yiddish. English
There is some evidence that North and West Germanic developed as a single language, Proto-Northwest Germanic, after East Germanic had begun to diverge. However, changes unproblematically datable to the PNWGmc period are few, suggesting that that period of linguistic unity did not last long.
Aug 22, 2024 · The fragmentation of Northwest Germanic can be dated roughly to the period of the 3rd–6th centuries with the development of three major dialect divisions: in Scandinavia, North Germanic; in Jutland and the northwest of Germany, North Sea Germanic; and in central Germany, South Germanic.
Dec 19, 2018 · The traditional claim is that at the earliest stages (2000+ years ago) Germanic had split into three branches: West, North, East. Later, West Germanic further split (likewise North Germanic), and ultimately you developed the contemporary languages.