The Germanic Languages

The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European family, and include English, German, Yiddish, Dutch, Frisian, and the Scandinavian languages. They are attested in Runic inscriptions from c. 200 AD, but the oldest surviving manuscripts in a Germanic language date from c. 600 AD, and consist primarily of portions of the New Testament translated into the now-extinct Gothic language.

The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three subgroups: East Germanic (Gothic, together with a number of lesser known languages such as Vandal and Burgundian, attested only in proper names), West Germanic (English, German, Yiddish, Dutch and Frisian), and North Germanic (the Scandinavian languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese). Of these, only North Germanic can really be said to form a coherent group: West Germanic exhibits great diversity, while East Germanic is too poorly attested to draw firm conclusions about its nature.

The genetic relationships between these subgroups is a vexed question: some scholars have placed North and East Germanic together, in opposition to the West Germanic languages (which are termed "South Germanic" according to this hypothesis). Particular attention has been paid to similarities between Old Gutnish (the early language of the Swedish island of Gotland) and Gothic. This is supported by the resemblance of the names of the Gutnish and Gothic peoples (cf. OGut. gutland "Gotland" and Goth. gutþiuda "the Gothic people"), and the passage in the Old Gutnish Guta Saga, the saga of the Gotlanders, which relates that some Gotlanders emigrated through Russia to the Byzantine empire, where they "settled and still live and even retain some of our language" (So bygþus þair þar firir, oc enn byggia, oc enn hafa þair sumt af waru mali). This has been taken to be a reference to the Crimean Goths, known still to use a form of the Gothic language as late as the 16th century. However, the similarities between Old Gutnish and Gothic are mostly superficial, and the ethnic names derive from the same word as Old Norse gotar "men", so the similarity could easily be coincidental. The remaining similarities between North Germanic and Gothic are relatively few, and for the most part involve shared retentions of Germanic forms, rather than common innovations.

More recently, it has been argued that the North Germanic and West Germanic branches derive from a common ancestor, with East Germanic splitting off as a separate branch at the time of the first Germanic emigrations from Scandinavia. This thesis is perhaps on stronger ground, depending on common innovations. However, these are largely in unstressed syllables, and the supposed changes would not, in my view, be enough to distinguish "North West Germanic" as a separate language from East Germanic. It is perhaps also instructive that the listed innovations sometimes include rhotacism (the change of Germanic *z to r): the documentary evidence of the earlier runic inscriptions clearly shows that this change occurred at a time when North and West Germanic were already separate.

Part of the problem is that East Germanic is known almost entirely through a single language, and that even this reflects essentially the language of one man - the bishop Wulfila, the translator of the Gothic Bible, and hence the creator of Gothic as a literary language. Other East Germanic languages are attested only through proper names included in texts in another language, and consequently it is impossible to draw firm conclusions about them. Therefore, we cannot say with certainty which features of Bible Gothic are common to East Germanic, and which innovations occurred only in Gothic.

Finally, it seems extremely likely that Germanic was already dialectally diverse at the time of the earliest emigrations from Scandinavia. As successive emigrations took place, it seems probable that the languages of those tribes remaining in Scandinavia continued to exercise mutual influence over each other, but that traces of older dialectal variations would nevertheless still remain. It's entirely conceivable that both hypotheses could be simultaneously right: the similarities between North and East Germanic could reflect older dialectal groupings within Common Germanic, while the similarities between North and West Germanic reflect shared innovations after the emigration of the East Germanic tribes.

Runic Norse

Coming soon: An Introduction to Runic Norse

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Last modified: 10/02/06