Germanisch

Germanisch, or Germanic in English, refers to a branch of the Indo-European language family and to the peoples historically associated with Northern Europe who spoke these languages. The term is used in linguistics to group a family of related languages and in archaeology and ethnography to discuss the Germanic-speaking populations of antiquity and the early medieval period.

Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed ancestor of all Germanic languages, spoken in parts of southern Scandinavia and northern Germany during the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. The branch divides into three traditional groups: North Germanic (Scandinavian languages such as Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese), West Germanic (German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and Frisian), and East Germanic (extinct languages including Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian).

Germanic languages share distinctive phonological and morphological features, including Grimm's Law (a systematic set of consonant shifts from Proto-Indo-European), Verner's Law (a later refinement), and certain inflectional patterns in nouns and verbs. They also show a tendency toward strong versus weak verb systems and a core vocabulary set.

East Germanic languages are known mainly from the Gothic Bible (4th–5th century). The West and North Germanic branches expanded during the early Middle Ages; later, their languages formed the basis for modern Germanic tongues, with English and Dutch prominent on the western margins and the Scandinavian languages in the north.

Today, Germanisch is used in linguistics to describe the historical and comparative study of these languages. The English term “Germanic” commonly covers both linguistic and cultural-historical contexts, including ancient tribes and medieval kingdoms associated with the Germanic peoples.