Some early Germanic languages made runic alphabets of their own, but use of these alphabets was comparatively limited. East Germanic languages were written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible into Gothic. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic tongue began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters. In addition to the standard Latin alphabet, some modern Germanic languages use a variety of accent marks, umlauts, the ess-tsett (ß), Ø, Æ, Å, ð, ȝ from Gaelic, and þ, from runes. Historic printed German is frequently set in a distinctive typeface called Fraktur.

Some of the tell-tale marks of Germanic roots are:

1. The levelling of the IE tense system into past and present (or common)
2. The use of a dental ending (/d/ or /t/) instead of switching vowels (ablaut) to show past tense.
3. Having two distinct types of verb conjugation: weak (regular) and strong (irregular). English has 161 strong verbs; all are of English birth.
4. The use of strong and weak adjectives. Modern English adjectives don't change except for comparative and superlative; this was not the case with Old English, where adjectives were inflected differently depending on whether they were preceded by an article or demonstrative, or not.
5. The sound shift known as Grimm's Law.
6. A great many non-IE roots. There are many Germanic roots that are not found in other IE tongues. These include words for everyday deeds such as "bite" and "chew" and all words about ships and the sea, except "boat". These roots may have been borrowed from the so-called Battle-axe people.
7. The shifting of stress onto the root of the stem. Though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what's added to them. This is perhaps the most important change.

Table of contents

1 Family tree 2 Comparison of Selected Terms 3 See also 4 External links

Family tree

All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic. Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form continuous clines, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.

Mentioned here are only the principal or unusual dialects; individual articles linked to below contain larger family trees. For example, many Low Saxon dialects are discussed on Low Saxon besides just Standard Low Saxon and Plautdietsch.

• West Germanic
  • High German
    • German
      • Middle German
        • East Middle German
          • Standard German (Hochdeutsch)
        • Luxembourgeois
        • West Middle German
          • Pennsylvania German (spoken by the Amish and other groups in southeastern Pennsylvania)
      • Upper German
        • Swiss German, Austrian, etc
        • Alemán Coloneiro (spoken in Venezuela)
        • Hutterite German (aka "Tirolean")
    • Yiddish (with a significant influx of vocabulary from Hebrew and traditionally written in the Hebrew alphabet)
  • Low German
    • Low Franconian
      • Dutch
      • Afrikaans (with a significant influx of vocabulary from other languages)
    • Low Saxon
      • Standard Low Saxon
      • Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German)
    • East Low German
  • Frisian
  • Anglic (descending from Anglo-Saxon)
    • Modern English (with a significant influx of French vocabulary)
    • Modern Scots
    • Cayman Islands English (not a creole)
    • Angloromany (with a significant influx of Romany vocabulary)
• East Germanic (extinct)
  • Gothic (extinct)
  • Crimean Gothic (extinct in the 1800s)
  • Vandalic (extinct)
  • Lombardic (extinct)
  • Burgundian (extinct)
• North Germanic (descending from Old Norse):
  • West (Insular) Scandinavian
    • Icelandic
    • Faroese
    • Norn (extinct)
    • Norwegian Nynorsk (disputed, strong continental (Danish) influence)
  • East (Continental) Scandinavian
    • Danish
      • Norwegian (Norwegian Bokmål)
    • Swedish

See also

• Language families and languages
• Non-Indo-European roots of Germanic languages

• Proto-Germanic Dictionary
• Ethnologue Report for Germanic