North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic , is a postulated grouping of the northern

West Germanic languages 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 West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into ...

that consists of

Old Frisian Old Frisian was a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries along the North Sea coast, roughly between the mouths of the Rhine and Weser rivers. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland (today's Northern Fries ...

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...

, and

Old Saxon Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German (spoken nowadays in Northern Germany, the northeastern Netherlands, southern Denmark, the Americas and parts of Eastern Europe). I ...

, and their descendants. Ingvaeonic is named after the

Ingaevones The Ingaevones were a West Germanic cultural group living in the Northern Germania along the North Sea coast in the areas of Jutland, Holstein, and Frisia in classical antiquity. Tribes in this area included the Angles, Frisii, Chauci, S ...

, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the

North Sea The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian ...

coast that was mentioned by both

Tacitus Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. The surviving portions of his two major works—the ...

and

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/2479), called Pliny the Elder (), was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic ' ...

(the latter also mentioned that tribes in the group included the

Cimbri The Cimbri (Greek Κίμβροι, ''Kímbroi''; Latin ''Cimbri'') were an ancient tribe in Europe. Ancient authors described them variously as a Celtic people (or Gaulish), Germanic people, or even Cimmerian. Several ancient sources indicate ...

, the

Teutoni The Teutons ( la, Teutones, , grc, Τεύτονες) were an ancient northern European tribe mentioned by Roman authors. The Teutons are best known for their participation, together with the Cimbri and other groups, in the Cimbrian War with t ...

and the Chauci). It is thought of as not a monolithic

proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattes ...

but as a group of closely related dialects that underwent several

areal change In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted ...

s in relative unison. The grouping was first proposed in ''Nordgermanen und Alemannen'' (1942) by German linguist and philologist Friedrich Maurer as an alternative to the strict tree diagrams, which had become popular following the work of 19th-century linguist August Schleicher and assumed the existence of a special Anglo-Frisian group. The other groupings are

Istvaeonic Weser-Rhine Germanic is a proposed group of prehistoric West Germanic dialects which would have been both directly ancestral to Dutch, as well as being a notable substratum influencing West Central German dialects. The term was introduced by the G ...

, from the Istvaeones, including Dutch,

Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gr ...

and related languages; and

Irminonic Elbe Germanic, also called Irminonic or Erminonic, is a term introduced by the German linguist Friedrich Maurer (1898–1984) in his book, ''Nordgermanen und Alemanen'', to describe the unattested proto-language, or dialectal grouping, ancestra ...

, from the

Irminones The Irminones, also referred to as Herminones or Hermiones ( grc, Ἑρμίονες), were a large group of early Germanic tribes settling in the Elbe watershed and by the first century AD expanding into Bavaria, Swabia and Bohemia. Notably this ...

, including the

High German languages The High German dialects (german: hochdeutsche Mundarten), or simply High German (); not to be confused with Standard High German which is commonly also called ''High German'', comprise the varieties of German spoken south of the Benrath and ...

Characteristics

Broadly speaking, the changes that characterise the Ingvaeonic languages can be divided into two groups, those being changes that occurred after the split from Proto-Northwest-Germanic (Ingvaeonic B) and those preceding it (Ingvaeonic A). Linguistic evidence for Ingvaeonic B observed in Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon is as follows: *The so-called

Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (also called the Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic nasal spirant law) is a description of a phonological development that occurred in the Ingvaeonic dialects of the West Germanic lan ...

: converted ''*munþ'' "mouth" into ''*mų̄þ'' (compare

''mūþ''). *Loss of the third-person

reflexive pronoun A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers to another noun or pronoun (its antecedent) within the same sentence. In the English language specifically, a reflexive pronoun will end in ''-self'' or ''-selves'', and refer to a previously n ...

s *The loss of

person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...

distinctions in

plural The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...

forms of

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

s, which reduced three forms into one form: merged ''*habjum'' "we have" and ''*habēþ'' "you (plural) have" with ''*habją̄þ'' "they have" *Palatalisation of velar consonants before front vowels; while the Anglo-Frisian languages further develop these palatal consonants into continuants like in ''church'', Old Saxon did undergo palatalisation as evidenced by forms like ''kiennan'' "know" and ''kiesur'' "emperor" (contrast German ''kennen, Kaiser'') as well as ''ieldan'' "pay," similar to English ''yield''. *Only four unstressed vowels, those being /i~e/, /æ/, /ɑ/, and /o~u/, all of which are short, though only in Early Old English before the loss of unstressed /æ/ *Lack of i-mutation in s/z-stem plurals; compare Anglian OE ''lombur'' "lambs" with OHG ''lembir'' *The development of Class III weak verbs into a relic class consisting of four verbs (''*sagjan'' "to say", ''*hugjan'' "to think", ''*habjan'' "to have", ''*libjan'' "to live") *The split of the Class II weak verb ending ''*-ōn'' into ''*-ōjan'': converted ''*makōn'' "to make" into ''*makōjan'' *Development of a plural ending ''*-ōs'' in a-stem nouns *Development of numerous new words, such as the replacement of ''*newun'' "nine" with ''*nigun'' and ''*minni'' "less" (adverb) with ''*laisi'' Changes originating in Ingvaeonic A, like

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlement ...

but unlike

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

and

Old High German Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050. There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old Hig ...

include: * Dative plurals and first person plural forms in numerous paradigms reduced to ''-um/-un''. Compare an-stem dative plural ''han-ōm''/''ōn'' (OHG) and ''han-am'' (Gothic) with ''hǫn-um'' (ON), ''han-um/un'' (OS) and ''han-um'' (OE). * Elimination of the weak stem -in- in n-stem noun paradigms. For example, OHG gen/dat. sg. ''han-en'' and Gothic ''han-in(s)'' versus OE ''han-an'', OS ''han-an/on'', OF ''hon-a'', and ON ''han-a''. * Shortening of pronominal and adjectival non-feminine dative singulars like ON ''þeim'', OE ''þǣm~þām,'' OF ''thām'', and OS ''thēm'', all of which have eliminated the final vowel; contrast Gothic ''þamma'' as well as OHG ''dëmu, dëmo, thëmu, thëmo'' and the like. Several, but not all, characteristics are also found in Dutch, which did not generally undergo the nasal spirant law (except for a few words), retained the three distinct plural endings (only to merge them in a later, unrelated change), and exhibits the ''-s'' plural in only a limited number of words. However, it lost the reflexive pronoun (even though it did later regain it via borrowing) and had the same four relic weak verbs in Class III.

Characteristics

References

Further reading