North Sea Germanic

North Sea Germanic
Ingvaeonic, Ingveonic,[1] coastal Germanic[1]
Geographic
distribution
Originally the North Sea coast from Friesland to Jutland; today, worldwide
Linguistic classificationIndo-European
Subdivisions
Glottolognort3175
The distribution of the primary Germanic languages in Europe c. AD 1:
  North Sea Germanic, or Ingvaeonic
  Weser–Rhine Germanic, or Istvaeonic
  Elbe Germanic, or Irminonic

North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic (/ˌɪŋvˈɒnɪk/ ING-vee-ON-ik)[2], is a postulated grouping of the northern West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants.

Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the North Sea coast that was mentioned by both Tacitus and Pliny the Elder (the latter also mentioning that tribes in the group included the Cimbri, the Teutoni and the Chauci). It is thought of as not a monolithic proto-language but as a group of closely related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison.

The grouping was first proposed in Nordgermanen und Alemannen (1942) by German linguist and philologist Friedrich Maurer as an alternative to the strict tree diagrams, which had become popular following the work of 19th-century linguist August Schleicher and assumed the existence of a special Anglo-Frisian group. The other groupings are Istvaeonic, from the Istvaeones, which developed into Franconian, and Irminonic, from the Irminones, which developed into Upper German.[3]

  1. ^ a b Anthonia Feitsma, ‘Democratic’ and ‘elitist’ trends and a Frisian standard, in: Andrew R. Linn, Nicola McLelland (eds.), Standardization: Studies from the Germanic Languages, 2002, p. 205 ff., here p. 205
  2. ^ "Ingvaeonic". CollinsDictionary.com. HarperCollins. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
  3. ^ Hans Frede Nielsen, Nordic-West Germanic relations, in: The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, volume 1 (series: Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft or short HSK 22.1), 2002, p. 558ff., here p. 558f.

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