The Germanic Languages

Ekkehard Konig, Johan van der Auwera

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317799573
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Languages

Provides a unique, up-to-date survey of twelve Germanic languages from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish.

1

The Germanic Languages

Carol Henriksen and Johan van der Auwera

Of the 4,000 to 6,000 languages presently spoken in the world, the Germanic languages form a very small subset. For the purposes of this book, there are only twelve modern Germanic languages, and even with the inclusion of varieties like Luxembourgish and Swiss German, and perhaps some 40 to 50 creoles, the membership remains modest. In terms of numbers of speakers, the Germanic group scores much better, for there are at least 450 million native speakers, which is approximately one twelfth of the world’s population. Still, even within Indo-European, the Romance languages with an estimated 580 million native speakers rank higher. What the Germanic languages are unrivalled in, however, is their geographical distribution. While originally these languages were confined to a small part of Europe, colonizers and immigrants successfully implanted them, particularly English, in the Americas, Africa (e.g. South Africa), Asia (e.g. India), as well as in the Pacific (e.g. Australia). Moreover, English has become the world’s most important international language, serving commerce, culture, diplomacy, and science, including linguistics.

The modest beginnings of this evolution seem to be found in the southern Baltic region (northern Germany, the Danish Isles, southern Scandinavia), which according to accepted opinion had been settled by speakers of Indo-European around 1000 BC. They encountered speakers of non-Indo-European origin, gradually changed their Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Germanic, and dispersed beyond the original homeland to occupy the region from the North Sea stretching to the River Vistula in Poland by 500 BC. The language spoken during this period is attested only indirectly, in the foreign words, usually proper names, used by Greek and Latin authors, and in early loans in neighbouring and co-territorial languages, especially Finno-Ugric and Baltic. The earliest direct records are Scandinavian runic inscriptions from the beginning of the third century AD.

It is customary to divide Germanic into East Germanic, with Gothic as its prominent member, North Germanic, with Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, and West Germanic (sometimes ‘South Germanic’), with German, Yiddish, Pennsylvania German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian and English. If we relate this variety to the one Common Germanic language of two thousand years ago, we face the question of how we got from the one parent language to the three branches and to the dozen or so descendant languages.

One factor to bear in mind is that every language is inherently variable. A language only exists through speakers that speak an idiolect, and typically share a dialect – and sociolect – with the people with whom they communicate most often or want to be associated. Thus some degree of dialectal variation must have prevailed in Common Germanic too, an assumption plausible also on purely linguistic grounds. Standard methods of linguistic reconstruction sometimes lead to two reconstructed forms rather than only one, suggesting that Common Germanic allowed both. Thus the inherent linguistic variation within Common Germanic itself may safely be taken as a partial explanation of later diffusion, in particular, of the distinction between North and West Germanic.

A second factor responsible for the variety in Germanic is migration. When speakers move away from their homeland and cut or strongly diminish communication with those who stay behind, the inherent tendency for dialect variation increases. The migrants, moreover, may come into contact with speakers of another language, which may alienate either language, in varying degrees, from the language of the previous generations. It may also lead to the disappearance of one or even both of the languages. A distinction may be made in terms of the language variety with which the migrants left. Did they leave with Common Germanic, with a branch of Germanic like relatively undifferentiated North Germanic, or with a fully differentiated separate Germanic language like English? Germanic illustrates each of these types and scenarios.

Towards the end of the pre-Christian era, Germanic tribes, including the Vandals, Burgundians and Goths, left the Common Germanic homeland. The Goths, the only ones that left any significant linguistic records, moved to the Baltic shores east of the Oder, some of them moving on to the Balkans around AD 200, and from there westward to Italy, France and Spain. Because of the initially eastern orientation of the migration, the language of the Goths is called ‘East Germanic’, and because it is generally taken to have separated from Common Germanic, it is considered a branch, on the same level as West and North Germanic.

Migrations that lead to increased linguistic diversity took place with respect to both North Germanic and West Germanic. During the Viking Age (c.800–c.1050) speakers of North Germanic settled in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, the Shetlands, the Hebrides and the Orkney Islands, parts of Ireland, Scotland, England, the Isle of Man and Normandy, along the shores of Finland and Estonia, and even in Novgorod, Kiev and Constantinople. Only in the case of Iceland and the Faroes did these migrations eventually lead to separate modern languages. In Finland, North Germanic was to be retained as a variant of Swedish, and in all other areas North Germanic was gradually given up. As for West Germanic, tribal groups of Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded England during the fifth and sixth centuries, and the Langobard(ic) (Lombard) tribe moved into Italy. Whereas the southward expansion proved unsuccessful (by the end of the first millenium Langobardic was basically extinct), the westward expansion led to modern English.

The third type of migration resulted primarily from the exploration and colonization of the world by Europeans from the fifteenth century onwards. Its strongest effect was to spread English around the globe. In terms of the fragmentation of Germanic, it led to the creation of colonial variants of Dutch, German and English, and to several creoles, especially of English. A special case is the development of Yiddish. The main form, Eastern Yiddish, is the result of the eastward migration of German-speaking Jews to Slavic territories from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, and from there back to the west (Europe, Palestine-Israel, and the general migration poles of the Americas, South Africa and Australia) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A third factor needed to explain how one ancestral language relates to a dozen descendant languages is standardization. Without this concept one would still not know why Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are considered different languages, even though mutual intelligibility is very high, whereas some northern and southern dialects of German, which are hardly mutually intelligible, are not considered separate languages. Standardization is the process whereby a community, typically a literate one, imposes a uniformity on its language in response to a growing desire of political, religious or cultural authorities for improved communication across dialects. The standard which then emerges is typically based on dialects that are (a) spoken in the economically and culturally strongest region; (b) deemed ‘authentic’ in a way that satisfies a sense of national identity in search of a national language; and/ or (c) more highly cross-dialectally intelligible than others. Early catalysts were the printing press; the attention for the native vernacular as opposed to Latin during the Renaissance, giving rise to the first grammars, dictionaries and academies; the Bible translations of the Reformation; and the appearance of strong centralized governments. One or more of these factors were at work in the making of standard Danish, Swedish, German, Dutch and English, and to a small extent Icelandic. The nationalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the major impulse for the development of Afrikaans, Faroese, Norwegian, and again Icelandic. Norwegian even has two standards, one based on the Danish-influenced language spoken by the élite, and the other reconstructed from conservative, ‘pure’ dialects. In the case of the languages without a nation state – Pennsylvania German, Yiddish and Frisian – standardization is a part of language promotion and maintenance efforts, initiated primarily by small numbers of nineteenth-and twentieth-century literary figures, journalists and linguists.

East Germanic

The first of the Germanic tribes to migrate from the Danish Isles and southern Sweden were the Goths, who presumably departed from the Common Germanic area around 100 BC. After crossing the Baltic they were joined by the Rugians, the Vandals and the Burgundians. Together these tribes constitute the eastern branch of Germanic known to us primarily from biblical translations from around AD 350. These translations, the majority of which have been attributed to Wulfila, the Bishop of the Western Goths, were undertaken after the Goths had settled on the Black Sea and become Christians.

The manuscript fragments which have come down to us containing a translation of the Bible into Gothic are not contemporary with Wulfila but were transcribed in Italy around AD 500. The most important are the Codex Argenteus in the University Library in Uppsala (330 leaves, of which 187 are still preserved, of the four Gospels), the Codex Carolinus in the library in Wolfenbüttel (four leaves containing about 42 verses from the Epistle to the Romans), the Codices Ambrosiani, 5 fragments in the Ambrosian Library in Milan (185 leaves containing portions of Epistles, a small fragment of a Gothic Calendar, St Matthew, Nehemiah and a commentary on St John), the Codex Turinensis in Turin (4 damaged leaves containing fragments of Epistles), and the Codex Gissensis, discovered in Egypt near the ancient town of Antinoë (a double sheet of parchment containing fragments from St Luke in Latin and Gothic).

Due to the early migration of the Gothic tribes, the language of the Goths developed differently from that of the West and North Germanic peoples, and as a consequence of subsequent migration into Italy, France and Spain, the Goths gradually became absorbed by other tribes and nations, thus leaving us with little more than Wulfila’s Bible translation as evidence of an East Germanic variety of the Germanic languages.

North Germanic

‘Common Scandinavian’ is a term often used for the Germanic language spoken in Scandinavia in the period after the ‘Great Migrations’ in which the organization of power was still local and tribal (c.550–c.1050). According to the historians Jordanes (c.550) and Procopius (c.554), there were many small tribal kings in the area which is now Scandinavia, all rivalling to extend their domain at the expense of the others. Of these, the dynasties of the Skjoldungs in Denmark and the Ynglings in Sweden and Norway were the most prominent. Like Common Germanic, Common Scandinavian is attested in runic inscriptions.

The language of the Viking Age (800–1050) was still relatively uniform, referred to as dǫnsk tunga ‘Danish tongue’ well into the Middle Ages. Since there are no native manuscripts from this period, our knowledge of the language derives from foreign texts, loanwords in other languages, place-names datable to this period, runic inscriptions, and later manuscripts, which either go back to an earlier oral tradition or are copies of earlier documents now lost.

Regarding the runic inscriptions, it is interesting to note that there are no or very few Danish inscriptions from around 600 to 800 and only a few, though very important ones, from Norway and Sweden. Around 800 we encounter a revival of runic writing in Denmark, but now in a new alphabet, the younger futhark. During this period there are 412 Danish inscriptions, 240 of them on stones erected by wealthy families to commemorate their dead. The younger futhark reached Norway around 800, but only a few inscriptions are preserved from this area. Runic writing is also found in the British Isles, Greenland and the Faroes, but in Iceland it is surprisingly sparse and late. Sweden became the great home of runic epigraphy in the younger futhark with more than 2,500 preserved inscriptions, testifying to the wealth and power of the leading families and at the same time providing valuable information concerning the fates of those who fell abroad on Viking expeditions. The fragments of poetry found in the runic inscriptions belong to the rich poetic tradition represented in the later Old Icelandic manuscripts.

Since the peoples of the north were linked together primarily by sea routes, it is easy to see how three separate centres of power began to emerge, a southern one (Denmark), a Baltic one (Sweden) and an Atlantic one (Norway). The Danish kings controlled the approaches to the Baltic, the Swedes occupied the region around Lake Malar, and the Norwegians controlled the fjords, primarily those on the west coast where navigation was best and access to foreign wealth close at hand. The establishment of a Danish archbishopric of the Roman Catholic Church in Lund in 1104, a Norwegian archbishopric in Trondheim (Nidaros) in 1152, and a corresponding Swedish archbishopric in Uppsala in 1164 reflects this political division of Scandinavia into Danish, Norwegian and Swedish kingdoms.

Towards the end of the Viking Age we find a gradual splitting up of Common Scandinavian, initially into two branches: East Scandinavian, comprising the kingdom of Denmark and the southern two-thirds of Sweden and adjacent parts of Norway; and West Scandinavian, comprising most of Norway and the Norwegian settlements in the North Atlantic, in particular Iceland.

East Scandinavian

The East Scandinavian branch is not so much a distinct language as the sum of the innovations that encompassed Denmark, most of Sweden, and adjacent parts of Norway at the end of the Viking Age, splitting during the Middle Ages (1050–1340) into Old Danish, Old Swedish and Old Gutnish, the written language of the island of Gotland. Of these, only Danish and Swedish survived the later processes of political centralization and linguistic standardization.

Danish

Danish (dansk) is the official language of the kingdom of Denmark (comprising Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland), where it is native to the majority of a population of over 5 million. Danish is also the first language or ‘cultural language’ of some 50,000 inhabitants in German Schleswig-Holstein, south of the Danish border.

Modern Standard Danish developed on the basis of the written language of the Reformation, further influenced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the spoken language of the influential citizens of Copenhagen, the economic and cultural centre of the emerging nation state.

The history of the Danish language falls into three major periods: Old Danish (c.800–c.1100), corresponding roughly to the Viking Age; Middle Danish (c.1100–c.1525), corresponding to the Middle Ages; and Modern Danish (after c.1525), the period after the Reformation and up to modern times.

Danish is the Scandinavian language that has moved farthest away from its Common Scandinavian roots, primarily due to Denmark’s geographic location, which forms a bridge between the Nordic countries and the European mainland.

Swedish

Swedish (svenska) is spoken as the official language of Sweden by a population of some 8.5 million inhabitants. It is also the first language of some 300,000 speakers in Finland (on the semi-independent Åland Islands and on the west and south coast) and the second language of various linguistic minorities, altogether up to a million, mostly recent immigrants but also indigenous Finns and Saamis (Lapps).

Prior to the Viking Age it is difficult to distinguish Swedish from Danish, but after c.800 the East Scandinavian languages begin to separate, with a major cleavage taking place after extensive Danish innovations around 1300.

Modern Standard Swedish developed in the Mälar-Uppland region, the location of the chief centres of government and learning since the Middle Ages (Stockholm and Uppsala), but the standard language was also influenced by the dialect of the Götaland region immediately to the south. While the cultivated pronunciation of Stockholm enjoys considerable prestige, there are also strongly resistant regional norms, particularly those of southern Sweden (skånska) and Finland (finlandssvenska).

The history of the Swedish language falls into two major periods: an Old Swedish period covering the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, further subdivided into the runic period (c.800–c.1225), the classical period (c.1225–c.1375) and the younger period (c.1375–c.1526); and a Modern Swedish period with Older Modern Swedish from c.1526 to c.1732 and Younger Modern Swedish from c.1732 to the present.

West Scandinavian

We can assume that there was re...