OudSaksisch

OudSaksisch, or Old Saxon, is a West Germanic language of the early Middle Ages, spoken roughly from the 8th to the 11th century in the Saxon lands north of the Elbe and Weser, in what is now northern Germany and parts of the Netherlands. It is the oldest well-documented Saxon language and belongs to the Ingvaeonic subgroup of West Germanic, closely related to Old English and Old Frisian. It is a direct ancestor of Middle Low German and influenced some Dutch dialects.

The surviving corpus consists mainly of religious and didactic texts and a few legal documents. The best-known works are the Heliand, an epic retelling of the life of Jesus, and the Old Saxon Genesis. Smaller translations, glosses, and verse fragments also survive, providing a picture of Christianization, culture, and daily life in early Saxon society.

Old Saxon was written in the Latin alphabet and used typical West Germanic grammar—three genders, four cases, and verb conjugation with strong and weak classes. Its vocabulary reflects Germanic roots with Latin religious borrowings.

Scholars study OudSaksisch to understand the early stages of northern European languages, the Christianization of Saxon lands, and the development of later Low German and Dutch varieties. The language faded as Middle Low German emerged between the 12th and 14th centuries.