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 three branches: Ingvaeonic, which includes English and Frisian; Istvaeonic, which encompasses Dutch and its close relatives; and Irminonic, which includes German and its close relatives and variants.
English is by far the most-spoken West Germanic language, with more than 1 billion speakers worldwide. Within Europe, the three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct variety of West Germanic. The language family also includes Afrikaans, Yiddish, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, and Scots. Additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch, English, or German.
History
Origins and characteristics
The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. In some cases, their exact relation was difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, so that some individual varieties have been difficult to classify. This is especially true for the unattested Jutish language; today, most scholars classify Jutish as a West Germanic variety with several features of North Germanic.
Until the late 20th century, some scholars claimed that all Germanic languages remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, while others hold that speakers of West Germanic dialects like Old Frankish and speakers of Gothic were already unable to communicate fluently by around the 3rd century AD. As a result of the substantial progress in the study of Proto-West Germanic in the early 21st century, there is a growing consensus that East and West Germanic indeed would have been mutually unintelligible at that time, whereas West and North Germanic remained partially intelligible.
Dialects with the features assigned to the western group formed from Proto-Germanic in the late Jastorf culture (). The West Germanic group is characterized by a number of phonological, morphological and lexical innovations or archaisms not found in North and East Germanic. Examples of West Germanic phonological particularities are:
The delabialization of all labiovelar consonants except word-initially. Change of *-zw- and *- đw- to *-ww- e.g. *izwiz > *iwwiz 'you' dat.pl.; *feđwōr > *fewwōr 'four'. , the fricative allophone of , becomes in all positions. (The two other fricatives and are retained.). This must have occurred after *-zw- and *- đw- have become *-ww-. Replacement of the second-person singular preterite ending -t with -ī (indicative and Subjunctive mood). For more than 150 years there has been a scientific debate on the best explanation of these difficult forms. Today, most linguists, beginning with J. v. Fierlinger in 1885 and followed by R. Löwe (1907), O. Behaghel (1922), Jakob Sverdrup (1927), Hermann Hirt (1932), E. Polomé (1964), W. Meid (1971), E. Hill (2004), K.-H. Mottausch and W. Euler (1992ff.) explain(ed) this ending as a relict of the Indo-European aorist tense. Under this assumption, the ending -t would have replaced older -ī(z). Sceptical about this explanation – and mostly explaining these forms as influenced by optative forms – were/are W. Scherer (1868), W. L. van Helten (before 1917), Edward Schröder (1921), Bammesberger (1986) and Don Ringe (2014). Loss of word-final . Only Old High German preserves it at all (as ) and only in single-syllable words. Following the later loss of word-final and , this made the nominative and accusative of many nouns identical. Loss of final *-a (including from PGmc. *-an#) in polysyllables: e.g. acc. sg. OHG horn vs. ORu. horna 'horn'; this change must have occurred after the loss of word-final . West Germanic gemination: lengthening of all consonants except before .; this change must have occurred after the loss of final *-a. Change of Proto-Germanic *e to i before i and j.
A relative chronology of about 20 sound changes from Proto-Northwest Germanic to Proto-West Germanic (some of them only regional) has been published by Don Ringe in 2014.
A phonological archaism of West Germanic is the preservation of grammatischer Wechsel in most verbs, particularly in Old High German. This implies the same for West Germanic, whereas in East and North Germanic many of these alternations (in Gothic almost all of them) had been levelled out analogically by the time of the earliest texts.
A common morphological innovation of the West Germanic languages is the development of a gerund.