The West Germanic Group

Around the beginning of our era the would-be West Germanic tribes dwelt in the lowlands between the Oder and the Elbe. Later they expanded in the eastern, southern and western directions. The Franks spread up the Rhine and they are accordingly subdivided into Low, Middle and High Franconians (Franks). The Angles, the Frisians, the Jutes and the Saxons inhabited the coastal area of northern Europe. A group of tribes known as High Germans (the Alemans, the Swabians, the Bavarians, the Thuringians and others) lived in the mountainous southern regions of Modern Germany.

The formation of the West Germanic group and their languages is connected with the unification of the continental Germanic tribes within the borders of the kingdom of the Franks.

The Frankish kingdom was the most important medieval Germanic state. Under Clovis I (reigned 481-511 AD), the Franks finished conquering Gaul and the Celts. Clovis converted to Christianity and founded the Merovingian dynasty. His descendants were known as the ``do-nothing kings’’, and the palace mayors began to govern. Mayor Pepin (reigned 751 – 768) had the Roman pope crown him king of the Franks. Pepin’s son Charles, known as Charles the Great (or Charlemagne) (reigned 768 – 814), founded the Carolingian dynasty. Towards the 9^th c. the Frankish kingdom grew into one of the largest states in Western Europe. Under Charles the Great, the kingdom embraced France, half of Italy, and stretched northwards up to the North and Baltic Seas. In 800 AD, Pope Leo III named Charles the Great Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was intended to reestablish the Roman Empire in the West. The Empire lacked ethnic and economic unity and in the 9^th c. broke up into parts. Its western part eventually became the basis of France. Though the names `France’, ‘French’ are de derived from the tribal name of the Franks, the Franconian dialects were not spoken there. The native population, the Romanised Celts of Gaul, spoke a local variety of Latin, which developed into the French language.

The eastern part of the Empire comprised several kingdoms: Swabia or Alemania, Bavaria, East Franconia, Saxony, etc. As seen from the names of the kingdoms, this part had a mixed population consisting of several West Germanic tribes.

Towards the 12^th c. their dialects had intermixed with neighbouring tongues, especially Middle and High Franconian, and eventually developed into the literary (High) German language. The written standard of (High) German was established after the Re-formation (16^th c.), though no spoken standard existed until the 19^th c. as Germany remained politically divided into a number of states. To this day German is remarkable for great dialectal diversity of speech. The total number of German–speaking people approaches 100 million.

The Franconian dialects that were spoken in the extreme North of the Empire later developed into Dutch and Flemish. Nowadays Dutch and its variant in Belgium, known as Flemish, are treated as a single language, Netherlandish/ˈneðələndiʃ/. Netherlandish is spoken by almost 20 million people.

In the 17^th c. South Africa was colonized by Dutch migrants. Their dialects in Africa eventually grew into a separate West Germanic language, Afrikaans/ˌæfriˈkɑ:n(t)s/.

The Afrikaans language is an official language of the Republic of South Africa and Namibia. Spoken mainly by the Afrikaners descendants of Dutch and other 17^th-century colonists — it is a variety of the Dutch language, modified by circumstance and the influence of German, French, English as well as local languages. It became an independent standardized written language in the end of the 19^th c.

Another Germanic language is Yiddish/ˈjidiʃ/. It grew from the High German dialects which were adopted by numerous Jewish communities scattered over Germany in the 11^th – 12^th c. These dialects blended with elements of Hebrew /ˈhi:bru:/ and Slavonic /slæˈvɔnik/and developed into a separate West Germanic language with a spoken and literary form. Yiddish was exported from Germany to many other countries: Russia, Poland, the Baltic states, the USA. It is written in the Hebrew alphabet and has many borrowed words (from Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, etc.).

At the later stage of the great migration period – in the 5^th c. – a group of West Germanic tribes started out on their invasion of the British Isles. The invaders came from the lowlands near the North Sea: the Angles, the Jutes, part of the Saxons and Frisians. Their dialects in the British Isles developed into the English language.

The Frisians, a Germanic people of north-western Europe, live in East Friesland, Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), in the Dutch province of Friesland (the Netherlands) and in the Frisian Islands of the North Sea (Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark).

In Roman times they occupied the coast of Holland and must have taken part in the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain. Their language is closely akin to Anglo-Saxon, with which it forms the Anglo-Frisian branch of the West Germanic languages.

The Frisian /ˈfriziən/language is represented by several dialects. It is almost extinct in the German districts of East Friesland, but it has attained some literally importance in the North Frisian Islands and Schleswig and developed a considerable literature in the West Frisian dialect of the Dutch province of Friesland.

Frisian is accepted as an official language in the Netherlands, and it has its own academy. It is used in schools and courts, especially in the Friesland area.

Thus, the West Germanic group of languages includes English, Frisian, (High) German, Yiddish, Netherlandish, and Afrikaans.

Date: 2014-12-22; view: 1908