East Germanic languages


The East Germanic languages are a group of extinct Germanic languages that were spoken by East Germanic peoples. East Germanic is one of the primary branches of Germanic languages, along with North Germanic and West Germanic.
The only East Germanic language of which texts are known is Gothic, although a word list and some short sentences survive from the debatably-related Crimean Gothic. Other East Germanic languages include Vandalic and Burgundian, though the only remnants of these languages are in the form of isolated words and short phrases. Furthermore, the inclusion of Burgundian has been called into doubt. Crimean Gothic is believed to have survived until the 18th century in isolated areas of Crimea.

Origin

The consensus view is that, of the three main branches of Germanic, East Germanic was the first to branch off, likely originating on the Baltic Sea and moving southward. Earlier scholarship sometimes instead proposed that the North Germanic languages were closely related to the East Germanic languages.

Classification

  • East Germanic †
  • * Gothic †
  • * Vandalic †
  • * Burgundian †
  • * Crimean Gothic †
Whereas historians use ethnographic and historical sources to determine whether Germanic groups were "East Germanic peoples," this information is not relevant to linguists. Because only Gothic is well preserved, there are no clear linguistic criteria that characterize all of the languages classified as East Germanic. According to the late-antique historian Procopius of Caesarea, the Ostrogoths, Vandals, Visigoths, and the Gepids all spoke a single Gothic language; this in turn means that linguists often apply the innovations of Gothic to the whole East Germanic group.
Frederik Hartmann argues that East Germanic is not a valid genetic clade, as the three most attested languages conventionally identified as east Germanic do not share any common innovations with each other and all independently split from Proto-Germanic. Hartmann instead prefers the term Eastern rim languages to refer to these languages.