2.3. West Germanic languages
The West branch of Germanic tribes, who lived between the Elbe and the Oder and along the North Sea coast, was linguistically diverse even at the beginning of our era. After the migrations of 3rd and 5th cc. there appeared the following West Germanic languages: Old English, Old Frisian, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian and Langobardic. (The terms low and high indicate the geographical regions of the Germanic area: high is associated with the mountainous part in the South, while low relates to northern lowlands)
Old English, Old Saxon and Old High German are supposed to be the result of certain tribes moving away from the common Germanic ‘homeland’, amongst others the Frisians, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Franks, Alemanni and Bavarians. Very roughly speaking, Old English out of the language of the Angles, the Saxons, the Frisians and the Jutes, Old Saxon out of the language of the Saxons and the Franks, Old High German out of the language of the Alemanni, the Bavarians and the Franks.
2.4. Germanic languages today
In the course of history the number of Germanic languages has changed. Some languages died out, mainly because of competition from another language. For example, all the East Germanic languages are now extinct. Gothic survived longest in the Crimea as late as the 18th c. Vandalic, Burgundian and one of the West Germanic languages, Langobardic, did not survive anywhere, either.
B
ut
almost all North and West Gmc languages have survived till modern
times and are spoken by more than 480 million people in northern and
western Europe, North America, South Africa, and Australia.
Some Gmc languages acquired the status of national ones, the others are restricted to certain territories. However, some new Gmc languages were formed, usually because of further migrations.
Thus, nowadays the West Germanic group is represented by:
English
German, which originates from Old High German
Low German or Plattdeutsch, the essential constituent of which has been Old Saxon
Dutch, developed from Old Low Franconian
Afrikaans, which is a successor to Dutch
Frisian
Yiddish, which originates from German and contains admixture of German, Romance, Hebrew and Slavic elements.
The North Germanic group compromises:
Swedish
Danish
Norwegian
Icelandic
Faroese, a successor to Old Norwegian.
3. Common characteristics of Germanic languages
All the Gmc languages of the past and present have common linguistic features of their structure and pronunciation that set them apart from the other IE languages.
3.1. Phonetics
a) A peculiar feature to all the Gmc languages is strong dynamic stress falling on the first root syllable of a word, especially a word of Germanic origin. Indo-European made great use of musical accent, which could fall on any syllable of a word. This so-called 'free accent' can be still seen, for example, in Russian р'уки и рук'и. But in PGmc the fixed stress accent became predominant. At the same time, there was a strong tendency in PGmc to adopt a uniform position for the stress on a word, by putting it on the first syllable. Though in Modern English we have an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress, regardless of what is added to them: cf. Engl. weak, weaken, weakening.
b) All the Germanic languages have undergone some common sound changes.
Strong evidence for the unity of all the modern Germanic languages can be found in the phenomenon known as the First Consonant Shift or Grimm's Law, which describes the regular changes undergone by Indo-European stop consonants represented in Germanic.
The First Consonant Shift is supposed to have begun at around the 5th c. BC and possibly took several centuries to complete. It consists of three groups: