The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the

West Germanic

languages

The West Germanic languages constitute

the largest of the three branches of the

Germanic family of languages (the others

being the North Germanic and the extinct

East Germanic languages).

West Germanic

Geographic distribution. Originally between the Rhine, Alps, Elbe,

and North Sea; today

worldwide Linguistic

classification

Indo-European

Germanic

West Germanic

Subdivisions North Sea

Germanic –

English, Scots,

Frisian, Low

German

Weser-Rhine

Germanic –

German (Central

German), Dutch,

Afrikaans

The three most prevalent West Germanic

languages are English, German, and

Dutch. The family also includes other

High and Low German languages

including Afrikaans (which is a daughter

language of Dutch), Yiddish and

Luxembourgish (which are sister

languages of German), and Frisian and

Scots (which are sister languages of

English). Additionally, several creoles,

patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch,

English, and German, as they were each

languages of colonial empires.

Origins and characteristics

The Germanic languages are traditionally

divided into three groups: West, East and

North Germanic.

[1] Their exact relation is

difficult to determine from the sparse

evidence of runic inscriptions, so that

some individual varieties are difficult to

classify. Although some scholars claim

that all Germanic languages remained

mutually intelligible throughout the

Migration Period, 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.

Dialects with the features assigned to thewestern group formed from ProtoGermanic in the late Jastorf culture (ca.

1st century BC). 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:

[2]

The delabialization of all labiovelar

consonants except word-initially.

West Germanic gemination:

lengthening of all consonants except

/r/ before /j/.

[ð], the fricative allophone of /d/,

becomes [d] in all positions. (The twoother fricatives [β] and [ɣ] are retained)

Replacement of the second-person

singular preterite ending -t with -ī.

Loss of word-final /z/.

[3] Only Old High

German preserves it at all (as /r/) and

only in single-syllable words. Following

the later loss of word-final /a/ and

/aN/, this made the nominative and

accusative of many nouns identical.

A remarkable 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 (in Gothicalmost all of them) 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:

The preservation of an instrumental

case,

the preservation of the athematic verbs

(e.g. Anglo-Saxon dō(m), Old Saxon

dōm, OHG. tōm "I do"),

the preservation of some traces of the

aorist (in Old English and Old HighGerman, but neither in Gothic nor in

North Germanic).

[4]

Furthermore, the West Germanic

languages share many lexemes not

existing in North Germanic and/or East

Germanic – archaisms as well as

common neologisms.

Existence of West Germanic protolanguage

Most scholars doubt that there was a

Proto-West-Germanic proto-language

common to the West Germanic

languages and no others, but a few

maintain that Proto-West-Germanic

existed.

[5] Most agree that after EastGermanic broke off (an event usually

dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC), the

remaining Germanic languages, the

Northwest Germanic languages, divided

into four main dialects:

[6] North

Germanic, and the three groups

conventionally called "West Germanic"

,

namely

1. North Sea Germanic, ancestral to

Anglo-Frisian and Old Saxon

2. Weser-Rhine Germanic, ancestral to

Low Franconian and in part to some

of the Central Franconian and Rhine

Franconian dialects of Old High

German3. Elbe Germanic, ancestral to the

Upper German and most Central

German dialects of Old High

German, and the extinct

Langobardic language.

Although there is quite a bit of knowledge

about North Sea Germanic or AngloFrisian (because of the characteristic

features of its daughter languages,

Anglo-Saxon/Old English and Old

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 dialectaldifferences 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,

[2]

including:

The lowering of Proto-Germanic ē (/ɛː/,

also written ǣ) to ā.

[7] The development of umlaut.

The rhotacism of /z/ to /r/.

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 runicinscriptions 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 beexplained simply as retentions later lost

in the North or East because the

assumption can produce contradictions

with attested features of the other

branches.