Anglo-Frisian languages

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Anglo-Frisian
Geographic distribution	Originally England, Scottish Lowlands and the North Sea coast from Friesland to Jutland; today worldwide
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic North Sea Germanic Anglo-Frisian
Subdivisions	Anglic Frisian
Glottolog	angl1264
Approximate present day distribution of the Anglo-Frisian languages in Europe. Anglic:   English   Scots Frisian:   West Frisian   North Frisian   Saterland Frisian Hatched areas indicate where multilingualism is common.

The Anglo-Frisian languages are the Anglic (English and Scots) and Frisian varieties of West Germanic languages. The Northumbrian Language Society also considers Northumbrian a separate Anglic language.^[1]

The Anglo-Frisian languages are distinct from other West Germanic languages due to several sound changes: besides the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, which is present in Low German as well, Anglo-Frisian brightening and palatalization of /k/ are for the most part unique to the modern Anglo-Frisian languages:

• English cheese and West Frisian tsiis, but Dutch kaas, Low German Kees, and German Käse
• English church and West Frisian tsjerke, but Dutch kerk, Low German Kerk, Kark, and German Kirche
• English sheep and West Frisian skiep, both singular and plural but Dutch schaap for singular, schapen for plural and Low German Schaap, both singular and plural and German Schaf for singular and Schafe for plural

The grouping is usually implied as a separate branch in regards to the tree model. According to this reading, English and Frisian would have had a proximal ancestral form in common that no other attested group shares. The early Anglo-Frisian varieties, like Old English and Old Frisian, and the third Ingvaeonic group at the time, the ancestor of Low German Old Saxon, were spoken by intercommunicating populations. While this has been cited as a reason for a few traits exclusively shared by Old Saxon and either Old English or Old Frisian,^[2] a genetic unity of the Anglo-Frisian languages beyond that of an Ingvaeonic subfamily can not be considered a majority opinion. In fact, the groupings of Ingvaeonic and West Germanic languages are highly debated, even though they rely on much more innovations and evidence. Some scholars consider a Proto-Anglo-Frisian language as disproven, as far as such postulates are falsifiable.^[2] Nevertheless, the close ties and strong similarities between the Anglic and the Frisian grouping are part of the scientific consensus. Therefore, the concept of Anglo-Frisian languages can be useful and is today employed without these implications.^[2][3]

Geography isolated the settlers of Great Britain from Continental Europe, except from contact with communities capable of open water navigation. This resulted in more Old Norse and Norman language influences during the development of Modern English, whereas the modern Frisian languages developed under contact with the southern Germanic populations, restricted to the continent.

Classification[]

The proposed Anglo-Frisian family tree is:

• Anglo-Frisian
  • Anglic
    • English
      • Northumbrian and Cumbrian (see the article about the Humber-Lune Line)
    • Scots
      • Insular Scots
      • Northern Scots
      • Central Scots
      • Southern Scots
      • Doric Scots
      • Ulster Scots
    • Yola (extinct)
    • Fingalian (extinct)
  • Frisian
    • West Frisian
    • East Frisian
      • Saterland Frisian (last remaining dialect of East Frisian)
    • North Frisian

Anglic languages[]

Anglic,^[4][5] Insular Germanic, or English languages^[6][7] encompass Old English and all the linguistic varieties descended from it. These include Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English; Early Scots, Middle Scots, and Modern Scots; and the extinct Yola and Fingallian in Ireland.

English-based creole languages are not generally included, as mainly only their lexicon and not necessarily their grammar, phonology, etc. comes from Modern and Early Modern English.

Frisian languages[]

The Frisian languages are a group of languages spoken by about 500,000 Frisian people on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. West Frisian, by far the most spoken of the three, is an official language in the Dutch province of Friesland and on two of the West Frisian Islands. North Frisian is spoken on some North Frisian Islands and parts of mainland North Frisia in the northernmost German district of Nordfriesland, and also in Heligoland in the German Bight, both part of Schleswig-Holstein state (Heligoland is part of its mainland district of Pinneberg). The East Frisian language is spoken in Saterland in Germany.

Anglo-Frisian developments[]

The following is a summary of the major sound changes affecting vowels in chronological order.^[8] For additional detail, see Phonological history of Old English. That these were simultaneous and in that order for all Anglo-Frisian languages is considered disproved by some scholars.^[2]

1. Backing and nasalization of West Germanic a and ā before a nasal consonant
2. Loss of n before a spirant, resulting in lengthening and nasalization of preceding vowel
3. Single form for present and preterite plurals
4. A-fronting: West Germanic a, ā → æ, ǣ, even in the diphthongs ai and au (see Anglo-Frisian brightening)
5. palatalization of Proto-Germanic *k and *g before front vowels (but not phonemicization of palatals)
6. A-restoration: æ, ǣ → a, ā under the influence of neighboring consonants
7. Second fronting: OE dialects (except West Saxon) and Frisian ǣ → ē
8. A-restoration: a restored before a back vowel in the following syllable (later in the Southumbrian dialects); Frisian æu → au → Old Frisian ā/a
9. OE breaking; in West Saxon palatal diphthongization follows
10. i-mutation followed by syncope; Old Frisian breaking follows
11. Phonemicization of palatals and assibilation, followed by second fronting in parts of West Mercia
12. Smoothing and back mutation

Comparisons[]

Numbers in Anglo-Frisian languages[]

These are the words for the numbers one to 12 in the Anglo-Frisian languages, with Dutch and German included for comparison:

* Ae [eː], [jeː] is an adjectival form used before nouns.^[9]

Words in English, Scots, West Frisian, Dutch, and German[]

Alternative grouping[]

Ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that encompasses Old Frisian, Old English,^{[note 4]} and Old Saxon.^[10]

It is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of closely related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison.^[11]

The grouping was first proposed in Nordgermanen und Alemannen (1942) by the German linguist and philologist Friedrich Maurer (1898–1984), as an alternative to the strict tree diagrams that had become popular following the work of the 19th-century linguist August Schleicher and which assumed the existence of an Anglo-Frisian group.^[12]

See also[]

• High German languages
• Low Franconian languages

Notes[]

References[]

Further reading[]

• Maurer, Friedrich (1942). Nordgermanen und Alemannen: Studien zur Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde (in German). Strasbourg: Hünenburg.
• Euler, Wolfram (2013). Das Westgermanische [West Germanic: from its Emergence in the 3rd up until its Dissolution in the 7th Century CE: Analyses and Reconstruction] (in German). London/Berlin: Verlag Inspiration Un Ltd. p. 244. ISBN 978-3-9812110-7-8.
• Ringe, Don; Taylor, Ann (2014). The Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English. 2. Oxford: University Press. ISBN 978-0199207848.