West Germanic languages


The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of Indo-European languages. The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into three branches: Ingvaeonic, which includes English, Scots, the Low German languages, and the Frisian languages; Istvaeonic, which encompasses Dutch and its close relatives; and Irminonic, which includes German and its close relatives and variants.
English is by far the most widely spoken West Germanic language, with over one billion speakers worldwide. Within Europe, the three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct variety of West Germanic. The language family also includes Afrikaans, Yiddish, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Hunsrik, and Scots. Additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch, English, or German.

History

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 Jute language; today, most scholars classify Jute as a West Germanic variety with several features of North Germanic.
Until the late 20th century, some scholars claimed that all Germanic languages remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, while others hold that speakers of West Germanic dialects like Old Frankish and speakers of Gothic were already unable to communicate fluently by around the 3rd century AD. As a result of the substantial progress in the study of Proto–West Germanic in the early 21st century, there is a growing consensus that East and West Germanic indeed would have been mutually unintelligible at that time, whereas West and North Germanic remained partially intelligible.
Dialects with the features assigned to the western group formed from Proto-Germanic in the late Jastorf culture. The West Germanic group is characterized by a number of phonological, morphological and lexical innovations or archaisms not found in North and East Germanic. Examples of West Germanic phonological particularities are:
  • The delabialization of all labiovelar consonants except word-initially.
  • Change of *-zw- and *- đw- to *-ww- e.g. *izwiz > *iwwiz 'you' dat.pl.; *feđwōr > *fewwōr 'four'.
  • , the fricative allophone of, becomes in all positions.. This must have occurred after *-zw- and *- đw- have become *-ww-.
  • Replacement of the second-person singular preterite ending -t with -ī. For more than 150 years there has been a scientific debate on the best explanation of these difficult forms. Today, some linguists, beginning with J. V. Fierlinger in 1885 and followed by R. Löwe, O. Behaghel, Jakob Sverdrup, Hermann Hirt, E. Polomé, W. Meid, E. Hill, K.-H. Mottausch and W. Euler explain this ending as a relic of the Indo-European aorist tense. Under this assumption, the ending -t would have replaced older -ī. Sceptical about this explanation – and mostly explaining these forms as influenced by optative forms – are W. Scherer, W. L. van Helten, Edward Schröder, Bammesberger and Don Ringe.
  • Loss of word-final. Only Old High German preserves it at all and only in single-syllable words. Following the later loss of word-final and, this made the nominative and accusative of many nouns identical.
  • Loss of final *-a in polysyllables: e.g. acc. sg. OHG horn vs. ORu. horna 'horn'; this change must have occurred after the loss of word-final.
  • West Germanic gemination: lengthening of all consonants except before.; this change must have occurred after the loss of final *-a.
  • Change of Proto-Germanic *e to i before i and j.
A relative chronology of about 20 sound changes from Proto–Northwest Germanic to Proto–West Germanic was published by Don Ringe in 2014.
A phonological archaism of West Germanic is the preservation of grammatischer Wechsel in most verbs, particularly in Old High German. This implies the same for West Germanic, whereas in East and North Germanic many of these alternations had been levelled out analogically by the time of the earliest texts.
A common morphological innovation of the West Germanic languages is the development of a gerund.
Common morphological archaisms of West Germanic include:
Furthermore, the West Germanic languages share many lexemes not existing in North Germanic and/or East Germanic – archaisms as well as common neologisms. Some lexemes have specific meanings in West Germanic and there are specific innovations in word formation and derivational morphology, for example neologisms ending with modern English -ship like friendship are specific to the West Germanic languages and are thus seen as a Proto West Germanic innovation.

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 Germanic Languages made the conviction grow that a West Germanic proto-language did exist. But up until the 1990s, some scholars doubted that there was once a Proto–West Germanic proto-language which was ancestral only to later West Germanic languages. In 2002, Gert Klingenschmitt presented a series of pioneering reconstructions of Proto–West Germanic morphological paradigmas and new views on some early West Germanic phonological changes, and in 2013 the first monographic analysis and description of Proto–West Germanic was published.
Today, there is a scientific consensus on what Don Ringe stated in 2012, that "these changes amount to a massive evidence for a valid West Germanic clade".
According to one proposal, after East Germanic broke off, the remaining Germanic languages, the Northwest Germanic languages, divided into four main dialects: North Germanic, and the three groups conventionally called "West Germanic", namely:
Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian, linguists know almost nothing about "Weser–Rhine Germanic" and "Elbe Germanic". In fact, both terms were coined in the 1940s to refer to groups of archaeological findings, rather than linguistic features. Only later were the terms applied to hypothetical dialectal differences within both regions. Even today, the very small number of Migration Period runic inscriptions from the area, many of them illegible, unclear or consisting only of one word, often a name, is insufficient to identify linguistic features specific to the two supposed dialect groups.
Evidence that East Germanic split off before the split between North and West Germanic comes from a number of linguistic innovations common to North and West Germanic, including:
  • The lowering of Proto-Germanic ē to ā.
  • The development of umlaut.
  • The rhotacism of to.
  • The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this.
Under that view, the properties that the West Germanic languages have in common, separate from the North Germanic languages, are not necessarily inherited from a "Proto–West Germanic" language, but may have spread by language contact among the Germanic languages spoken in Central Europe, not reaching those spoken in Scandinavia or reaching them much later. Rhotacism, for example, was largely complete in West Germanic while North Germanic runic inscriptions still clearly distinguished the two phonemes. There is also evidence that the lowering of ē to ā occurred first in West Germanic and spread to North Germanic later since word-final ē was lowered before it was shortened in West Germanic, but in North Germanic the shortening occurred first, resulting in e that later merged with i. However, there are also a number of common archaisms in West Germanic shared by neither Old Norse nor Gothic. Some authors who support the concept of a West Germanic proto-language claim that, not only shared innovations can require the existence of a linguistic clade, but also that there are archaisms that cannot be explained simply as retentions later lost in the North or East, because this assumption can produce contradictions with attested features of the other branches.
Concerning the existence of a Proto–West Germanic clade Ringe has argued that "all the West Germanic languages share several highly unusual innovations that virtually force us to posit a West Germanic clade", although "the internal subgrouping of both North Germanic and West Germanic is very messy, and it seems clear that each of those subfamilies diversified into a network of dialects that remained in contact for a considerable period of time ".

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 Ringe and Ann Taylor.