Middle Low German

Middle Low German is a developmental stage of Low German. It developed from the Old Saxon language in the Middle Ages and has been documented in writing since about 1225–34. During the Hanseatic period, Middle Low German was the leading written language in the north of Central Europe and served as a lingua franca in the northern half of Europe. It was used parallel to medieval Latin also for purposes of diplomacy and for deeds.

Terminology

While Middle Low German is a scholarly term developed in hindsight, speakers in their time referred to the language mainly as sassisch or de sassische sprâke. In contrast to Latin as the primary written language, speakers also referred to discourse in Saxon as speaking/writing to dǖde, i.e. 'clearly, intelligibly'. This contains the same root as dǖdisch 'German' which could also be used for Low German if the context was clear. Compare also the modern colloquial term Platt denoting Low German dialects in contrast to the written standard.
Another medieval term is ôstersch which was at first applied to the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic Sea, their territory being called Ôsterlant, their inhabitants Ôsterlinge. This appellation was later expanded to other German Hanseatic cities and it was a general name for Hanseatic merchants in the Netherlands, e.g. in Bruges where they had their komptôr.
In the 16th century, the term nedderlendisch gained ground, contrasting Saxon with the German dialects in the uplands to the south. It became dominant in the High German dialects, while sassisch remained the most widespread term within MLG. The equivalent of 'Low German' seems to have been introduced later on by High German speakers and at first applied especially to Netherlanders.
Middle Low German is a modern term used with varying degrees of inclusivity. It is distinguished from Middle High German, spoken to the south, which was later replaced by Early New High German. Though Middle Dutch is today usually excluded from MLG, it is sometimes, especially in older literature, included in MLG, which then encompasses the dialect continuum of all high-medieval Continental Germanic dialects outside MHG, from Flanders in the West to the eastern Baltic.

Extent

Middle Low German covered a wider area than the Old Saxon language of the preceding period, due to expansion to the East and, to a lesser degree, to the North.
In the East, the MLG-speaking area expanded greatly as part of the Ostsiedlung in the 12th to 14th century and came to include Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Prussia, which were hitherto dominated by Slavic and Baltic tribes. Some pockets of these native peoples persisted for quite some time, e.g. the Wends along the lower Elbe until about 1700 or the Kashubians of Eastern Pomerania up to modern times.
In the North, the Frisian-speaking areas along the North Sea diminished in favour of Saxon, esp. in East Frisia which largely switched to MLG since the mid-14th century. North of the Elbe, MLG advanced slowly into Sleswick, against Danish and North Frisian, although the whole region was ruled by Denmark. MLG exerted a huge influence upon Scandinavia, even if native speakers of Low German were mostly confined to the cities where they formed colonies of merchants and craftsmen. It was an official language of Old Livonia, whose population consisted mostly of Baltic and Finnic tribes.
In the West, at the Zuiderzee, the forests of the Veluwe and close to the Lower Rhine, MLG bordered on closely related Low Franconian dialects whose written language was mainly Middle Dutch. In earlier times, these were sometimes included in the modern definition of MLG.
In the South, MLG bordered on High German dialects roughly along the northern borders of Hesse and Thuringia. The language border then ran eastwards across the plain of the middle Elbe until it met the Sorb-speaking area along the upper Spree that separated it from High German. The border was never a sharp one, rather a continuum. The modern convention is to use the pronunciation of northern maken vs. southern machen for determining an exact border. Along the middle Elbe and lower Saale rivers, Low German began to retreat in favour of High German dialects already during Late Medieval times.

History

Sub-periods of Middle Low German are:

Early Middle Low German : 1200–1350, or 1200–1370
Classical Middle Low German : 1350–1500, or 1370–1530
Late Middle Low German : 1500–1600, or 1530–1650

Middle Low German was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, spoken all around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. It used to be thought that the language of Lübeck was dominant enough to become a normative standard for an emergent spoken and written standard, but more recent work has established that there is no evidence for this and that Middle Low German was non-standardised.
Middle Low German provided a large number of loanwords to languages spoken around the Baltic Sea as a result of the activities of Hanseatic traders. Its traces can be seen in the Scandinavian, Finnic, and Baltic languages, as well as Standard High German and English. It is considered the largest single source of loanwords in Danish, Estonian, Latvian, Norwegian and Swedish.
Beginning in the 15th century, Middle Low German fell out of favour compared to Early Modern High German, which was first used by elites as a written and, later, a spoken language. Reasons for this loss of prestige include the decline of the Hanseatic League, followed by political heteronomy of northern Germany and the cultural predominance of central and southern Germany during the Protestant Reformation and Luther's translation of the Bible.

Phonology and orthography

The description is based on Lasch which continues to be the authoritative comprehensive grammar of the language but is not necessarily up-to-date in every detail.

Consonants

Square brackets indicate allophones.
Round brackets indicate phonemes that do not have phoneme status in the whole language area or are marginal in the phonological system.

It is not rare to find the same word in MLG affected by one of the following phonological processes in one text and unaffected by it in another text because the lack of a written standard, the dialectal variation and ongoing linguistic change during the Middle Low German era.
General notes

Final devoicing: Voiced obstruents in the syllable coda are devoiced, e.g. geven but gift. The change took place early in MLG but is not always represented in writing. Proclitic words like mid might remain voiced before a vowel because they are perceived as one phonological unit with the following word. Also, as can already be seen in Old Saxon, lenited is devoiced to before syllabic nasals or liquids, e.g. gaffel from PG *gabalō.
Grammatischer Wechsel: Because of sound changes in Proto-Germanic, some words had different sounds in different grammatical forms. In MLG, there were only fossilised remnants of the "grammatischer wechsel", namely for and, e.g. kêsen but koren, and for and, e.g. vân < PG *fanhaną but gevangen < PG *fanganaz.
Assimilation: A sound becoming more similar to a neighbouring sound, usually in place or manner of articulation, is very common across all languages. Early MLG did mark assimilation much more often in writing than later periods, e.g. vamme instead of van deme.
Dissimilation: In MLG, it frequently happened with vs. or vs., e.g. balbêrer < barbêrer, or knuflôk < kluflôk. Both forms frequently co-existed. The complete loss of a sound in proximity to an identical sound can also be explained in such a way, e.g. the loss of in Willem < Wilhelm.
Metathesis: Some sounds tended to switch their places, especially the "liquids" and. Both forms may co-exist, e.g. brennen vs. bernen.
Gemination: In MLG, geminate consonants, which came into being by assimilation or syncope, were no longer pronounced as such. Instead, geminate spelling marks the preceding vowel as short. Many variants exist, like combinations of voiced and voiceless consonants. Late MLG tended to use clusters of similar consonants after short as well as long vowels for no apparent reason, e.g. tidth for tîd.
h spellings: A mute h appeared sporadically after consonants already in Old Saxon. Its use greatly increased in MLG, first at the end of a word, when it often marked the preceding vowel as long, but it later appears largely randomly. In very late times, the use of h directly after the vowel is sometimes adopted from Modern High German as a sign of vowel length.

Specific notes on nasals

had a tendency to shift to in the coda, e.g. dem > den.
* Intervocalic is sometimes spelled mb whether or not it developed from Old Saxon.
assimilated to before velars and.
Final often dropped out in unstressed position before consonants, e.g., hebbe wi, cf. Modern Dutch for a similar process. Similarly, it often dropped from -clusters after unstressed vowels, especially in Westphalian, e.g. jârlix < jârlings.
Furthermore, had been deleted in certain coda positions several centuries earlier, but there were many exceptions and restorations through analogy: the shifted form gôs with an unshifted plural gense was quite common. Non-shifted forms have been common in the more innovative Eastern dialects.

Specific notes on stops and fricatives

as a stop is always word-initially, at the onset of stressed syllables and geminated. Its allophones in other cases are word-internal and word-final .
Voiceless usually appeared word-initially, word-finally, otherwise between short vowels and nasals/liquids and in loans.
* It was mostly written v in the syllable onset, f in the coda. Exceptions include loans, some proper names, cases like gaffel as mentioned earlier and sporadically before u and before l and r. Sometimes, w is used for v, and ph for f.
* In MLG texts, there is usually no clear graphic distinction between v and u. The distinction between both is used in modern dictionaries, in grammars and in this article simply for better readability. Thus, in the manuscripts, e.g. auer is aver.
was originally an approximant but seems to have later shifted towards a fricative. Its exact articulation likely differed from dialect to dialect, and many of them merged word-internally with, an allophone of.
* In writing, w for word-internal was kept strictly separate from at first, but the use of w later also expanded to.
* The clusters,,, were originally often written with v/''u but later mostly shifted to a w''-spelling, except for, which kept qu from Latin influence.
The dentals and tended to drop out between unstressed vowels, e.g. antwēr instead of antwēder, and in word-final clusters like, or, e.g. often rech next to recht, schrîf next to schrîft.
Remnants of Old Saxon shifted via into in the early MLG era. After and, it was the case already in late Old Saxon. For, word-final and some frequent words like dat, the change also happened very early. The changes happened earliest in Westphalian and latest in North Low Saxon.
was voiced intervocalically as. Whether it was voiced word-initially is not fully clear. There seems to have been dialectal variation, with voiceless more likely for Westphalian and voiced more likely for East Elbian dialects.
* Because of the variation, voiceless was often written tz, cz, c etc. for clarity.
The phonemic status of is difficult to determine because of the extremely irregular orthography. Its status likely differed between the dialects, with early MLG having and no phonemic, and e.g. East Elbian and in general many later dialects had from earlier. If there is phonemic, it often replaces in clusters like and.
Connected with the status of is the manner of articulation of. Orthographic variants and some modern dialects seem to point to a more retracted, more sh-like pronunciation, especially if there was no need to distinguish and. This is consistent with modern Westphalian.
is at best a marginal role as a phoneme and appears in loans or develops because of compounding or epenthesis. Note the palatalised .
* In writing, it was often marked by copious clustering, e.g. ertzcebischope.
before front vowels is strongly palatalised in Old Saxon and at least some of early MLG, as can be seen from spellings like zint for kint and the variation of placename spellings, especially in Nordalbingian and Eastphalian, e.g. Tzellingehusen for modern Kellinghusen. The palatalisation, perhaps as or, persisted until the High Middle Ages but was later mostly reversed. Thus, for instance, the old affricate in the Slavic placename Liubici could be reinterpreted as a velar stop, giving the modern name Lübeck. A few words and placenames completely palatalised and shifted their velar into a sibilant.
* Early MLG frequently used c for , which later became rarer. However, geminate k continued to be written ck, more rarely kk or gk.
* gk otherwise appeared often after nasal.
* was often written x, especially in the West.
* usually appeared as qu, under Latin influence.
Furthermore, after unstressed, often changed into, e.g. in the frequent derivational suffix -lik or, with final devoicing, in sich instead of sik.
* Sometimes, ch was used for a syllable-final . The h can be seen a sign of lengthening of the preceding vowel, not of spirantisation.
was a fricative. Its exact articulation probably differed by dialect. Broadly, there seem to have been dialects that distinguished a voiced palatal and a voiced velar, depending on surrounding vowels, and dialects that always used word-initially and word-internally. Nevertheless, was kept separate from old. In the coda position, became a dorsal fricative, thus merging with.
* The spelling gh was at first used almost exclusively before e or word-finally but began to spread to other positions, notably before i. It did not indicate a different pronunciation but was part of an orthographic pattern seen in many other parts of Europe. Furthermore, in early western traditions of MLG, sometimes ch was used for in all positions, even word-initially.
* Coda was mostly spelled ch because it completely merged with historic .
After nasals and as a geminate, appeared as a stop, e.g. seggen "to say", penninghe "pennies". In contrast to modern varieties, it remained audible after a nasal. Pronouncing g word-initially as a stop is likely a comparatively recent innovation under High German influence.
* gg could be used for in older MLG, e.g. Dudiggerode for the town of Düringerode.
was frequently dropped between sonorants, e.g. bormêster < borgermêster.
was often epenthetised between a stressed and an unstressed vowel, e.g. neigen < Old Saxon *nāian, or vrûghe < Old Saxon frūa. In Westphalian, this sound could harden into , e.g. eggere.
in the onset was a glottal fricative, and it merged with historic in the coda. Word-final after consonant or long vowel was frequently dropped, e.g. hôch or hô. In a compound or phrase, it often became silent.
* Onset was written h, while coda = was mostly written ch but also g and the like because of its merger with.
Coda = frequently dropped between and, e.g. Engelbert with the common component -bert < Old Saxon -berht. In unstressed syllables, it could also occur between a vowel and, e.g. nit < Old Saxon niowiht.
* Often, h was used for other purposes than its actual sound value: to mark vowel length, to "strengthen" short words, to mark a vocalic onset or vowel hiatus.

Specific notes on approximants

was a palatal approximant and remained separate from, the palatal allophone of.
* It was often spelled g before front vowels and was not confused with gh =. The variant y was sometimes used.
was likely an alveolar trill or flap, like in most traditional Low German dialects until recently. Post-vocalic sometimes dropped, especially before.
was originally probably velarised, i.e. a "dark l", at least in the coda, judging from its influence on surrounding vowels, but it was never extensively vocalised as Dutch was. During the MLG era, it seems to have shifted to a "clear l" in many dialects and tended to be dropped in some usually unstressed words, especially in Westphalian, e.g., as, instead of alse.