As I said in my previous Cunning Linguistics 101 post, found here, when I got bored again, I'd post on the basics of Germanic languages. Why the hell should you care about Germanic languages? Well, you're speaking one, most likely. With the exception of a couple guys here, all of us have a Germanic language as our native one. All of you speaking English, it's Germanic. For the few who natively speak German (of course), Norwegian, or Danish, those are Germanic, too. So are Dutch, Faroese, Frisian, Icelandic, Swedish, Yiddish, Afrikaans, Deitsch (also known as Pennsylvania Dutch), Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low Saxon), Scots, Westphalian and Eastphalian, Saxon, Wymysojer, Austro-Bavarian, Swiss, and several extinct languages such as Norn, Gothic, Burgundian, Gutnish, Yola, and Vandalic.

Of course, some of those are actually considered dialects rather than separate languages. For example, Swiss, Austro-Bavarian, and the -phalians are considered dialects of German. However, they are mostly mutually unintelligible with Standard German. In fact, pretty much nobody speaks Standard German outside of formal communication and writing. Afrikaans is very close to Dutch, but it remains a seperate language. Scots, which is the language Robert Burns wrote in, is actually very close to English but is varyingly considered a seperate language or a dialect, depending on who you ask. Confused yet? That's okay, everybody is. The Germanic languages are almost more of a puzzle when it comes to categorizing than any other language.

There are three main branches of Germanic languages, only two of which have living languages: North Germanic and West Germanic. The dead one is East Germanic, under which falls Gothic, Burgundian, Vandalic, and Crimean Gothic. These are also called South Germanic languages. South Germanic is also a synonym for West Germanic. So, depending on classification, you could call the East Germanic languages West Germanic. But fortunately, North Germanic is entirely straightforward. For the most part, we'll just ignore East Germanic once we get past the rise of Germanic.

West Germanic holds most branches of modern Germanic languages. There are two main branches: South Germanic and Anglo-Frisian. South Germanic splits into East Germanic, High German, Low Franconian, and Low German. High German holds most languages spoken in the South of Germany and the surrounding area, such as Austro-Bavarian, Standard German, Yiddish, and Luxembourgish. Low German is languages spoken mostly in the North of Germany, such as Westphalian and Low Saxon. Now why is North Low and South High? Yeah, it's confusing, but it's all to do with mountains. The South is mountainous (highlands), the North is flatter (lowlands). Now, Low Franconian is pretty much Dutch. Afrikaans and all the Dutch languages such as Hollandic, Flemish, Zealandic, and Limburgish.

Anglo-Frisian is where we'd be most at home. It pretty much splits into the Frisian languages (East, West, and North, with Saterlan Frisian being a sublanguage of East Frisian) and the Anglic languages: English, Scots, and Yola. Frisian is spoken on the very fringes of the Netherlands and Germany, on the southern edge of the North Sea. It's actually about the closest extant language to Old English. Scots, of course, is spoken in Scotland, Yola was spoken in Ireland (it's now extinct). Both were offshoots of English at various points. English, well, that's spoken all over the world.

Now, the North Germanic Languages are also known as the Norse languages. No, your eyes do not deceive you, Norse and North have the same root. North Germanic is split into West and East Scandinavian. West includes Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese (spoken in the Faroe Islands between England and Europe), and the extinct Norn. East includes Swedish, Danish, and the extinct Gutnish.

It is at this point I'd like to introduce to you a little friend of ours called the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet. It's a basic alphabet meant to encompass within single characters any sound that a human being uses in language, thus making it possible to pronounce anything without confusion. As we have seen the use of digraphs (such as “th” or “ch”) can lead to ambiguity; “ch” can be the sound in change or loch, “th” as in they or thing. The IPA sheds this ambiguity and is therefore a very valuable tool for linguists. You don't have to memorize the IPA, but whenever you see something I write enclosed in brackets [] or slashes //, that means it's in IPA notation, and it is not pronounced as it would be in English. It's a little complicated to begin with, but by slowly learning it, the things I say in these topics in the future will become much less complicated. Believe me, it's worth it.

To understand where the Germanic languages came from, let's start from the beginning. If you read my previous topic, you'll know a little about Proto-Indo-European. That spawned what's known as Proto-Germanic. Proto-Germanic (PG) came about sometime around the 500 BC era after the migrants from the PIE culture experienced what are known as Grimm's Law and Verner's Law. I explained Grimm's Law in my previous topic, but to recap: unvoiced plosive consonants (/p/, /t/, /k/) became unvoice fricatives (/f/ /θ/, /x/), voiced unaspirated plosive consonants (/b/, /d/, /g/ became unvoiced, and voiced aspirated plosive consonants (/bʰ/, /dʰ/, /gʰ/) lost their aspiration. Verner's Law states that unvoiced fricative consonants become voiced (/v/, /ð/, /ɣ/) after an unstressed syllable. If you don't know the difference between a stressed and unstressed syllable, think back to your HS literature classes. I'm sure you covered it at least in the unit on poetry.

Proto-Germanic had six cases: nominative, dative, accusative, genitive, vocative, and instrumental. In most modern Germanic languages, there are only four: nominative, dative, accusative, and genitive. In English, we drop dative Nominative is essentially just naming something or when it's the subject of a sentence (“I”), accusative is the direct object of a transitive verb (and in English, also the indirect object, with some modification) (“me”), dative is the indirect object, and genitive is the posessive (“my/mine”). Vocative is used for a noun to show that it is being addressed (“Jack” in “how are you, Jack?”). In modern English and most Germanic languages, this is covered by the nominative. Instrumental denotes an instrument that is used by the subject to accomplish an action (“gun” in “I shot the deer with my gun”). This is also usually covered by the nominative in most Germanic languages.

PG also had a number of unique features that spread to Germanic languages, such as verb strength. There are strong and weak verbs. Strong verbs are modified by ablaut (changing the vowel, as in “I sing, I sang, I have sung”) to denote different tenses, whereas weak verbs are modified by a dental suffix (/t/ or /d/), another unique feature (as in, “I smoke, I smoked, I have smoked”). It also had strong and weak adjectives, depending on whether or not they were preceded by an article (a/an, the) or demonstrative (this, that, these, those). This feature existed in Old English, but no longer exists in modern English.

There are also a number of words of non-Proto-Indo-European origin in Germanic languages. These are thought to have come about with what is known as the Germanic substrate hypothesis, which states that Proto-Germanic arose as a sort of creole or contact language between the PIE culture and another “substrate” culture, which provided this vocabulary and may have provided the other grammatical differences.

Further into the mechanics of the language, there existed 6 vowels: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ (all of which have their Spanish values as written), and /æ/, which is the “a” from “cat.” /i/, /e/, and /u/ have lengthened values (meaning they were pronounced slightly longer; many languages distinguish along this value, but some, such as English, do not), /o/ only had a long state, and /a/ and /æ/ were only short. These have been retained in most Germanic languages, but many others have been added. English, for example, has an average of 13 monophthong vowels and 5 diphthongs, with variances in dialects. Proto-Germanic had 20 consonants, and English has 26 (which vary very little outside of speech defects).

The articles (the, a/an in English) were added as a suffix, a system that can still be seen in Icelandic and other North Germanic languages. The West Germanic languages turned it into a particle, like the English “the” and “a/an,” or the German “der/die/das” and “ein/eine” and the case-declined forms of those. Nouns were very heavily case-declined, and so it was possible to tell exactly which part of speech a word was based on the ending stem tacked to the root. For example, “wulfaz” would be the nominative singular, and “wulfōn” would be the genitive plural. This declension carried into most Germanic languages, although as I stated earlier, it is all but lost in English, for better or for worse.

As far as writing, runes known as the elder fuþark (“þ” is pronounced as the “th” in “thing”) have existed since about 150 AD, but that was after the division of PG into other recognizable languages. It's believed that there was no method of writing Germanic languages before the runes. However, the runes eventually became quite advanced; starting as 24 characters written on stone, they eventually spread into the 29 characters in the Anglo-Saxon fuþorc, and runes continued to be used until as late as the 1800s for normal writing. The Latinization of Germanic languages came some time after Christianization.

I think that serves as a good, basic introduction to the Germanic languages. At any rate, Proto-Germanic existed for only a short time before being divided into noticeably different languages, and I'll go a bit into the history of the spread in the next such article I do: The Rise of the English Language as We Know It.