Early testimonies of West Germanic are in Old Frankish/Old Dutch (the 5th-century Bergakker inscription), Old High German (scattered words and sentences 6th century and coherent texts 9th century), and Old English (oldest texts 650, coherent texts 10th century).
Others spelling variants may be encountered in written Scots, e.g.
For a full classification, see List of Germanic languages. (Contrast, for example, the Balto-Slavic languages, which have largely kept the Indo-European pitch accent and consequently preserved much of the inherited morphology.) Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. 500 BC,[33] and Proto-Norse from the 2nd century AD and later is still quite close to reconstructed Proto-Germanic, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia and Denmark.
Present-day German can be divided into three broad dialect regions.
The a-stem, ō-stem, and n-stem declensions were the most common and represented targets into which the other declensions were eventually absorbed, but this process occurred only gradually. König, Ekkehard and Johan van der Auwera (eds) 2002.
The Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically assimilated by their respective neighbors by about the 7th century, with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the 18th century.
In Proto-Germanic, that had progressed only to the point that absolutely-final short vowels (other than /i/ and /u/) were lost and absolutely-final long vowels were shortened, but all of the early literary languages show a more advanced state of vowel loss.
In.
In three months, the house will still be being built or If you had not acted so stupidly, we would never have been caught) is almost entirely due to subsequent developments (although paralleled in many of the other Germanic languages).
Scots is also derived from West Germanic (from northern forms of Old English dialects). The table below shows the succession of the significant historical stages of each language (horizontally) and their approximate groupings in subfamilies (vertically).
South of this is the central band which stretches across from Luxemburg in the west to Saxony in the east. The last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken until the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.
For vowels, only the outcomes in stressed syllables are shown. Swedish is also spoken by some people in Estonia.
Old English and its closest relatives. Proto-Germanic developed a strong stress accent on the first syllable of the root, but remnants of the original free PIE accent are visible due to Verner's Law, which was sensitive to this accent. The following shows a typical masculine a-stem noun, Proto-Germanic *fiskaz ("fish"), and its development in the various old literary languages: Originally, adjectives in Proto-Indo-European followed the same declensional classes as nouns.
As a result, the definite endings were thought of as too "weak" to carry inflectional meaning and in need of "strengthening" by the presence of an accompanying determiner, while the indefinite endings were viewed as "strong" enough to indicate the inflectional categories even when standing alone. In German, the distinctive case endings formerly present on nouns have largely disappeared, with the result that the load of distinguishing one case from another is almost entirely carried by determiners and adjectives. Proto-Germanic /j/ and /w/ were often lost between vowels in all languages, often with /j/ or /w/ later reappearing to break the hiatus, and not always corresponding to the sound previously present. English is a current, This phenomenon is not restricted to German, but constitutes.
In the 21st century, its dialects are dying out[nb 3] due to Standard German gaining primacy.[13].
The spellings used are those based on the prestigious literary conventions described in the article Modern Scots.
It includes Bavarian, which extends from Bavaria in Germany into adjoining Austria, and … Comparative lists are also available for Romance Languages, for both vocabulary and verb conjugations. The local language of Luxemburg – Letzebergisch – is also Germanic. It is only in Middle Dutch and modern German that the various vowel-stem nouns have merged to the point that a binary strong/weak distinction clearly applies.
German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico and Australia. The linguistic contact of the Viking settlers of the Danelaw with the Anglo-Saxons left traces in the English language and is suspected to have facilitated the collapse of Old English grammar that resulted in Middle English from the 12th century.
München: Fink.