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2.Frisian and the Germanic languages

2.1.History and classification of the Germanic languages_¹¹

The Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages has a large number of speakers, approximately 450 million native speakers, partly due to the colonization of many parts of the world. However, the number of different languages within the Germanic group is rather limited. Depending on the definition of what counts as a language there are about 12 different languages. Traditionally, they are divided into three subgroups: East Germanic (Gothic, which is no longer a living language), North Germanic (Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish), and West Germanic (English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and Frisian). Some of these languages are so similar that they are only considered independent languages because of their position as standardized languages spoken within the limits of a state. This goes for the languages of the Scandinavian countries, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, which are mutually intelligible. Other languages consist of dialects which are in fact so different that they are no longer mutually intelligible but are still considered one language because of standardization. Northern and southern German dialects are an example of this situation.




Figure 3. The genetic tree of Germanic languages.
In Figure 1, a traditional Germanic genetic tree is shown. We constructed this tree on the basis of data in the literature. The tree gives just a rough division, and linguistic distances should not be derived from this tree. It is commonly assumed that the Germanic languages originate from the southern Scandinavian and the northern German region. After the migration of the Goths to the Balkans towards the end of the pre-Christian era, North-West Germanic remained uniform till the 5th century AD, after which a split between North and West Germanic occurred owing to dialectal variation and the departure of the Anglo-Saxons from the Continent and the colonization of Jutland.

During the Viking Age, speakers of North Germanic settled in a large geographic area, which eventually led to the five modern languages (see above). Of these languages, Icelandic (and to a lesser degree Faeroese), which is based on the language of southwestern Norway where the settlers came from, can be considered the most conservative language (Sandøy, 1994). Of the three mainland Scandinavian languages, Danish has moved farthest away from the common Scandinavian roots due to influences from the south.

The parentage of the West Germanic languages is less clear. Different tribal groups representing different dialect groups spread across the area, which eventually resulted in the modern language situation. Historically Frisian and English both belong to the Ingwaeonic branch of the West Germanic language group. Originally the Frisian speech community extended from the present Danish-German border along the coast to the French-Belgian border in the south. However, expansion from Saxons and Franconians from the east and the south throughout the medieval period resulted in a loss of large Frisian areas and a division into three mutually intelligible varieties: West Frisian (spoken in the northern Dutch province of Friesland by more than 350,000 people), East Frisian or Saterlandic (spoken by a thousand speakers in three villages west of Bremen) and North Frisian (spoken by less than ten thousand people on the islands on the north-western coast of Germany).

The English language came into being as a result of immigrations of tribal Anglo-Saxon groups from the North Sea coast during the fifth and sixth centuries. Whereas other insular Germanic varieties are in general rather conservative, the English insularity lacked this conservatism. English is considered most closely related to Frisian on every linguistic level due to their common ancestorship and to continued language contact over the North Sea.

The German language is spoken in many European countries in a large number of dialects and varieties, which can be divided into Low German and High German. Yiddish, too, can be regarded as a German variety. Dutch is mainly based on the western varieties of the low Franconian area but low Saxon and Frisian elements are also found in this standard language. Scholars disagree about the precise position of Dutch and Low German in the language tree. They can be traced back to a common root often referred to as the Ingwaeonic language group, but are often grouped together with High German as a separate West Germanic group. This grouping with High German might be the best representation of the modern language situation given that the individual dialects spoken in the area in fact form a dialect continuum. Afrikaans, finally, is a contemporary West Germanic language, developed from seventeenth century Dutch as a result of colonization, but with influences from African languages.