The common form that the languages of the Germanic branch had before they became differentiated is known as Germanic or Proto-Germanic. It antedates the earliest written records of the family and is reconstructed by philologists in the same way as is the parent Indo-European. The languages descended from it fall into three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic.
The principal language of East Germanic is Gothic. By the third century the Goths had spread from the Vistula to the shore of the Black Sea and in the following century they were Christianized by a missionary named Ulfilas (311–383), whose father seems to have been a Goth and his mother a Greek (Cappadocian). Our knowledge of Gothic is almost wholly due to a translation of the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament made by Ulfilas. Except for some runic inscriptions in Scandinavia it is the earliest record of a Germanic language we possess. For a time the Goths played a prominent part in European history, including in their extensive conquests both Italy, by the Ostrogoths, and Spain, by the Visigoths. In these districts, however, their language soon gave place to Latin, and even elsewhere it seems not to have maintained a very tenacious existence. Gothic survived longest in the Crimea, where vestiges of it were noted down in the sixteenth century. To the East Germanic branch belonged also Burgundian and Vandalic, but our knowledge of these languages is confined to a small number of proper names.
North Germanic is found in Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Runic inscriptions from the third century preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form the common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken of as Old Norse. From about the eleventh century on, dialectal differences become noticeable. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: an eastern group including Swedish and Danish, and a western group including Norwegian and Icelandic. Norwegian ceased to be a literary language in the fourteenth century, and Danish (with Norwegian elements) is one written language of Norway.
Of the early Scandinavian languages Old Icelandic is by far the most literary. Iceland was colonized by settlers from Norway about A.D. 874 and early preserved a body of heroic literature unsurpassed among the Germanic peoples. Among the more important monuments are the Elder or Poetic Edda, a collection of poems that probably date from the tenth or eleventh century, the Younger or Prose Edda compiled by Snorri Sturluson (1178–1241), and about forty sagas, or prose epics, in which the lives and exploits of various traditional figures are related.
West Germanic is of chief interest to us as the group to which English belongs. It is divided into two branches, High and Low German, by the operation of a Second (or High German) Sound-Shift analogous to that described above as Grimm’s Law. This change, by which West Germanic p, t, k, d, etc. were changed into other sounds, occurred about A.D. 600 in the southern or mountainous part of the Germanic area but did not take place in the lowlands to the north. Accordingly in early times we distinguish as Low German tongues Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. The last two are closely related and constitute a special or Anglo-Frisian subgroup.
Old Saxon has become the essential constituent of modern Low German or Plattdeutsch; Old Low Franconian, with some mixture of Frisian and Saxon elements, is the basis of modern Dutch in the Netherlands and Flemish in northern Belgium; and Frisian survives in the Netherland province of Friesland, in a small part of Schleswig, in the islands along the coast, and other places. High German comprises a number of dialects (Middle, Rhenish, and East Franconian, Bavarian, Alemannic, etc.). It is divided chronologically into Old High German (before 1100), Middle High German (1100–1500), and Modern High German (since 1500). High German, especially as spoken in the midlands and used in the imperial chancery, was popularized by Luther’s translation of the Bible (1522–1532) and since the sixteenth century has gradually established itself as the literary language of Germany.
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