Many other similarities, however, are indeed old inheritances. 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).. The Germanic family itself has subgroups; English is in the West Germanic branch along with German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and a few others. Thus, we can say that English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. On the other hand, 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 (in some cases right up to the present).Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic morphological paradigmsIf indeed Proto-West-Germanic existed, it must have been between the 2nd and 4th centuries. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. History of Old Scandinavian. To these figures may be added those for persons with another native language who have learned one of the Germanic languages for commercial, scientific, literary, or other purposes. Note, however, the particular changes described above, as well as The noun paradigms of Proto-West Germanic have been reconstructed as follows:The following table compares a number of Frisian, English, Dutch and German words with common West Germanic (or older) origin.

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Professor of Linguistics, Princeton University, 1960–79. Author of The Sounds of English and German. F. Nielsen (1981, 2001), G. Klingenschmitt (2002) and K.-H. Mottausch (1998, 2011)sources: Ringe, Don / Taylor, Ann (2014) and Euler, Wolfram (2013), Author of "Ontstaan en vroegste ontwikkeling van het Nederlandse taalandschap" in Some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages.

Twenty-third edition.

(1) Proto-Indo-European * Comparison of phonological and morphological featuresComparison of phonological and morphological featuresOriginal meaning "relative" has become "brother or sister" in English.H. West Germanic languages all trace back to one parent language. For example, the plural of the word for "sheep" was originally unchanged in all four languages and still is in some Dutch dialects and a great deal of German dialects. Perhaps due to its geographical position on the crossroads between West and East in what can truly be called Central Europe, it somehow sounds less Slavic and more like a unique mixture of Slavic and the other, generally Germanic languages that surround it. Dallas, Texas: SIL International.

What makes English like the other languages in its subfamily?

Until the late 2nd century AD, the language of runic inscriptions found in Scandinavia and in Northern Germany were so similar that Proto-North-Germanic and the Western dialects in the south were still part of one language ("Proto-Northwest-Germanic"). ii that all the West Germanic languages share several highly unusual innovations that virtually force us to posit a West Germanic clade. After that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Germanic languages Derivation of Germanic languages from Proto-Germanic.

Thus, the Proto-Germanic *The above example shows that such reconstructions are more than mere formulas of relationship; they also give some indication of how Proto-Germanic actually sounded. The three most prevalent West Germanic languages are Most scholars doubt that there was a Proto-West-Germanic Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian (due to characteristic features of its daughter languages, Anglo-Saxon/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,Under this 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 The debate on the existence of a Proto-West-Germanic clade was recently summarized: Although for some language families there are written records of the parent language (e.g., for the Such reconstructions are, in part, merely formulas of relationship.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.In numbers of native speakers, English, with 450 million, clearly ranks third among the languages of the world (after Mandarin and Spanish); German, with some 98 million, probably ranks 10th (after Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese).

Occasionally scholars are fortunate enough to find external confirmation of these deductions. Professor of Germanic Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1949–60. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica.Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.

The original vowel system of West Germanic was similar to The consonant system was also essentially the same as that of Proto-Germanic. All these language groups are subsequent developments of a still earlier parent language for which there are, again, no written records but which can be reconstructed as The special characteristics of the Germanic languages that distinguish them from other Indo-European languages result from numerous phonological and grammatical changes.In addition to these general changes, there were two special ones. The Note that some of the shown similarities of Frisian and English vis-à-vis Dutch and German are secondary and not due to a closer relationship between them.

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