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20 Contact and the History
of Germanic Languages
PAUL ROBERGE
1 The Germanic Languages
The Germanic languages are, as the phrase suggests, a group of languages that
trace their origin to a common ancestor and constitute a branch of the Indo-European
language family. Prior to the beginning of the present era, Germanic is presumed
to have been “a fairly homogenous linguistic and cultural unit” (Prokosch 1939: 26).
Proto-Germanic (in German Urgermanisch) is the hypothetical “parent” language
existing at a given point in time: “We assume a single Germanic language, with
a common core of speakers, on the basis of elements common to all its dialects”
(Lehmann 2007: Preface). Lehmann (1977: 287), who does not take account of
possible pre-Germanic linguistic encounters, asserts further that “we...have
good evidence to conclude that Germanic was little influenced in structure by
external contacts leading to interference until approximately the middle of the first
millennium B.C.” After the formation of Proto-Germanic at the turn of the fifth
century BCE, external influences come to be considerable.
Over the course of approximately a millennium and a half, the ancestral
language fragmented into dialects, which ultimately gave rise to the universally
recognized independent languages of the European metropole, in all their vari-
eties: English, German, Dutch, and Frisian comprise the West Germanic group;
Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish – together with the insular Scandinavian
languages of Faroese and Icelandic – make up the North Germanic group. A third
group, East Germanic (of which Gothic is the principal representative), has
been extinct since at least the sixteenth century. None of these languages
has developed without contact with others, but the mechanisms of linguistic
diversification are conventionally understood in terms of primary hybridization
(in the sense of Whinnom 1971) following the separations of peoples from the
core group. Accordingly, the structural distance between the daughter dialects is
the aggregate of a series of (mostly) incremental system-internal mutations that
have taken place during the uninterrupted intergenerational transmission of
grammar over a period of some two millennia. Yet, none of this is as straight-
forward as it sounds.
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 407
2 Non-Indo-European Substratal Influences
The presence of non-Indo-European languages in areas in which Indo-European
dialects would eventually become superordinate has been established beyond
doubt in many instances. Whether or not there was a linguistic substratum for
Germanic has long been a matter of dispute (see Prokosch 1926, for a considered
assessment of older theories; also Neumann 1971; Vennemann 1984; Mees 2003);
but nowadays most authorities acknowledge that there must have been one. Polomé
(1990: 337, emphasis in original) stakes out a strong position regarding what the
Indo-European vanguard encountered in northern Europe: “There is no doubt that
whichever way northern Europe was Indo-Europeanized, the new population
initially constituted a mere adstratum or superstratum to a long-established set of
peoples. When and why the language shift took place remains widely an open
question, but one thing is certain: it did not take place without leaving clear traces
of the prior language(s) in the lexicon.”
The most compelling argument rests on a substantial number of terms in
Germanic that do not admit satisfactory Indo-European etymologies. Consider,
for example, two cross-cultural terms in Germanic that are loans from coterri-
torial languages. As Hamp (1979) has shown, the Germanic term for ‘apple’
(Crimean Gothic apel, ON1epli, OE æppel, OHG apful) and its congeners in Celtic,
Baltic, and Slavic point to a prehistoric *Oblu-, clearly a non-Indo-European form;
on the term for ‘apple’ see Markey (1988; 1989b: 599–600); also Vennemann (1998:
132–4). The source for the Germanic word for ‘silver’ (Go. silubr, ON silfr, OE
seolfor, OS silubar, OHG sil(a)bar) and cognates in Baltic and Slavic is obscure but
may be due to substratal contact with Vasconic; cf. Basque zilar,zidar (Biscayan)
(Polomé, 1987: 229; Vennemann, 1997: 881–2). Feist (31924: 88) estimated that up
to a third of Germanic vocabulary is of non-Indo-European origin, and this figure
is sometimes referenced in the literature (e.g. Witczak 1996: 171–2; Salmons
2004). Prokosch (1939: 23) thought that further etymological analysis would
reduce that figure “to a negligible quantity,” while Vennemann (2000: 233) opines
that such research would take it much higher, to more than half and possibly
even three-fourths. Interestingly, Salmons (1992: 107–8, following Bird 1982: 119)
has determined that 67.4 percent of Pokorny’s (1959) Indo-European roots are
represented in Germanic, which is at once consistent with Feist’s estimate but turns
out to be the highest retention rate of all the Indo-European daughter dialects.
Salmons (2004) cautions that even when lexical items appear to satisfy the cri-
teria for substratum status (set out by Polomé 1989: 54–5), they could still reflect
internal neologisms.
Some linguists have attached great importance to prehistoric contact between
Indo-Europeans and non-Indo-European strata of population, positing contact
of sufficient intensity to leave an imprint on the structure of a pre-Germanic
recipient language in the course of language shift. The Germanic consonant shift
has sometimes been considered a phonological transfer from a substratum (e.g.
Güntert 1934: 72; Witczak 1996: 167–9), although mainstream comparative Germanic
linguistics has generally resisted such proposals (cf. Polomé 1992: 77–8). Feist (1928;
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408 Paul Roberge
1932) attributed at least part of the structure and lexicon of Germanic to a con-
tact situation that arose along the trade routes between northern Europe and
the Mediterranean. Accordingly, Illyro-Venetic speakers colonized territories in
the southern Baltic region and Indo-Europeanized a pre-Germanic population, which
had previously spoken a different language. Feist (1932: 252) conjectured that “the
mutation of consonants did not take place on Germanic territory, but [rather]
Indo-European was passed on to the Pre-Germans with its consonants already
‘mutated’.” The intermediaries for this superstratal imposition of a phonological
pattern onto the indigenous community were perhaps the Veneti mentioned by
Tacitus in eastern Germany (Germania, ch. 46), whom he failed to identify as a
Slavic tribe (Polomé 1980: 194). Though antiquarian, Feist’s substratum studies
have drawn comment in contemporary scholarship (cf. Polomé 1970b: 49; 1979:
68; 1980: 186; 1985: 49; Mees 2003: 19–21). It has been asserted that Germanic
is not particularly archaic (Schutz 1983: 310; Beekes 1995: 29). That assertion appears
to be grounded in the longstanding assumption that Germanic lost a number of
original Indo-European verbal categories – such as the imperfect, the aorist, the
forms of the subjunctive, and the mediopassive (save for a vestigial presence in
Gothic) – in addition to a reduction of the nominal case system and radical changes
in phonology (cf. Polomé 1979: 681; 1987: 234).
3 Europa Vasconica et Semitica?
Although the presence of an autochthonous prehistoric population in northern
Europe is probable, the identity of its peoples and their language(s) and culture(s)
have proved elusive. In numerous publications (summarized in Vennemann
2003; this volume), Theo Vennemann tackles the fundamental questions that
arise in connection with pre-Indo-European strata, as part of a research program:
Who were these people? Where did they come from? Which languages did they
speak? In Vennemann’s theory, languages of three filiations were spoken in pre-
historic Europe north of the Alps: Old European (a branch of Vasconic, of which
Modern Basque is the sole survivor); Atlantic (a branch of what Vennemann
calls “Semitidic,” of which Hamito-Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) languages constitute a
daughter subfamily); and West Indo-European.
The Vasconic Old Europeans dispersed into western, central, and eastern Europe
starting already in the eighth millennium BCE; they eventually became adstrata
and then substrata of the other languages. The Vasconic legacy resides in the Old
European hydronymy – which Krahe (e.g. 1964) construed as Indo-European –
and toponymy, lexical items for which there are no tenable Indo-European ety-
mologies, the vigesimal numerical system in Danish and other European languages,
and the initial-syllable accent of Germanic, Italic, and Celtic (Vennemann 2003:
324–5). From the fifth millennium BCE onward, seafaring Semitidic peoples
migrated north along the Atlantic littoral to all the islands and up the navigable
rivers as colonizers, leaving visible traces in Europe in the form of the Megalithic
culture. The Semitidic Atlantic languages were, initially, in their areas of
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 409
concentration, superstrata and adstrata. In the west their presence affected the
Vasconic Old European languages. Indo-European became supersrata and
adstrata everywhere in its spread range, except for the continental northwest
and north, where Indo-Europeans had arrived before the Atlantic peoples. In
Germania Indo-European became a substratum of a dominant Semitidic language.
Regarding these views of language contact, Vennemann has not had many fol-
lowers. This may be due partly to his propounding some rather bold claims about
language contact in the remote past, which inevitably invite serious disagreement
on matters of methodology, interpretation, and fact. Whatever it may fail to account
for and with due allowance for lexical borrowing from non-Indo-European
source languages, the standard view that the Germanic strong verb system is the
result of internal morphological change will remain the preferred explanation
(cf. Baldi & Page 2006: 2201–4). But resistance to Vennemann’s position is due
not only to its contrariness with regard to mainstream opinion. Proponents of
substratum explanations have not (explicitly) attached much importance to
the theoretical underpinnings of reconstructed language contact. Nevertheless,
Vennemann’s attempt to identify and empirically ground hitherto unknown,
unattested linguistic strata is in itself a laudable endeavor.
4 Germanic Contacts with Finno-Ugric
In addition to encounters between dialects within its own genetic spread, north-
west Indo-European came into a sustained contact with Finno-Ugric at the begin-
ning of the first millennium BCE or perhaps even as early as the latter half of the
second millennium BCE (cf. Polomé 1992: 82; Salmons 1992: 82; Koivulehto 2002:
583–5). This contact continued “apparently without noticeable interruptions”
through the pre-, Proto-, and Common Germanic stages and would extend
through the historical periods until the present time (Koivulehto 2002: 590).
Germanic influences manifest themselves most visibly in the form of loanwords
in (mainly) Finnic and/or Sami. These loans pattern themselves in chronological
layers, which can be adduced from the phonological features that the words
exhibit in the recipient languages. The lowering of PGmc. *e1to *atook place in
Northwest Germanic but not Gothic, as we see in PGmc. *men- ‘moon’ >Go. mena,
ON máni, OHG/OS mano, OE mona (-o-<-a-before nasal). This change took place
after the breakup of Proto-Germanic and is assignable perhaps to the first cen-
tury BCE (see Koivulehto 1981). Markey (1999: 146–53) analyzes Go. meki ‘short
sword’, ON mækir, OE mece, OS maki ‘sword’ as reflexes of a cross-cultural term
for ‘sword’ that is ultimately related to Greek mácaira ‘knife, dagger’ and entered
Germanic as a secondarily suffixed *meg-(i)yo- (from a primary root *meg-) with
the lengthened grade. From Germanic, *mek(i)ja- ‘sword’ spread to neighboring
Slavic and Finnic dialects. We may infer from the vocalism of Finnish miekka ‘sword’
that the latter was part of an early layer of borrowings from Germanic, miekka
having been adopted in the mid first millennium BCE but obviously prior to the
lowering of PGmc. *e1to *a. Similarly, Go. paida ‘tunic, shirt’, OHG pheit ‘garment’,
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410 Paul Roberge
OS peda ‘garment’, OE pad‘coat’ are generally thought to reflect Greek baíth, itself
probably a cross-cultural word (cf. Lehmann 1986: 271) that reached Germanic
prior to the consonant shift; Finnish paita ‘shirt’ is a borrowing from Germanic in
which d >tis regular.
Owing to the conservatism of some Finnish dialects over the past two millennia,
the oldest Germanic loanwords constitute important evidence in the reconstruc-
tion of Proto-Germanic, even if their value has been overestimated at times (see
Juntune 1973, for discussion). Finnish rengas ‘ring’, for example, is supposed to
confirm *hrengaz as the correct reconstruction of this lexical item in Proto-
Germanic, whereas all attested Germanic languages show iin the tonic syllable
before a nasal plus a consonant (ON hringr, OHG/OE/OS hring). Finnish rengas,
kuningas ‘king’ (<PGmc. *kuningaz; cf. ON konungr, OHG cuning, OS kuning, OE
cyning) appear to preserve the Proto-Germanic masculine nominative singular
ending *-az (<PIE *-os), which, following the fixation of accent on the first or root
syllable, became reduced or lost altogether in the daughter dialects.
Koivulehto has proposed numerous etymologies (surveyed in Koivulehto
2002: 585–90) that would show the Germanic contribution to Finnic and Sami
lexicons to be sizable; see further Hofstra (1985) and also de Vries (1977:
xxxiv–xli), who includes younger, specifically North Germanic loans in his lists.
The deep lexical impact of early Germanic on Finnic might lead one to question
whether the standard view of adstratal influence adequately captures the contact
situation in prehistoric northwestern Europe. It has in fact been suggested that
Germanic also influenced Finnic phonological development owing to the existence
of a Germanic-speaking superstratum in regions populated by Finnic groups,
a view that has become widely accepted in Finno-Ugric historical linguistics
(Posti 1953; Koivulehto 2002: 590–1; but see also Kallio 2000). Koivulehto (2002:
590) seeks to explain the Finnic consonant gradation (the lenition of p,t,k,sin
certain environments) as the culmination of internal phonetic tendencies that
were enhanced by external influence, namely, from a Germanic Verner’s Law that
antedates the Germanic consonant shift proper (cf. Koivulehto & Vennemann 1996),
which of course is in itself a controversial proposal. The unidirectionality of early
Germanic lexical transfer suggests that this putative Germanic superstratum did
not maintain its position for a long period and was gradually assimilated into the
native population.
5 Language Contact within the Northwest
Indo-European Spread
Linguistically, Indo-European “constitutes a complicated blend in which the pro-
portions of the common elements vary greatly from branch to branch” (Prokosch
1939: 23). Some Indo-European language groups show greater affinities to one
another than to other groups within the family. Comparative linguistics has
long been concerned with (inter alia) the earliest relationships between the
ancestors of the various branches of Indo-European. Germanic shares significant
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 411
commonalities with Baltic, Slavic, Celtic, and Italic, along with some possible links
to Illyrian and Venetic; see Polomé (1970a; 1970b; 1972) for detailed discussion;
also Nielsen (1989: 18–28) for a concise survey. These correspondences are pre-
ponderantly lexical, though grammatical parallels are also to be discerned.
There is, however, a great deal of uncertainty about prehistoric Indo-European
groupings between the breakup of the hypothetical linguistic unity and the
formation of strongly diversified daughter dialects. Not only do we know far too
little about the origins of Germanic, “there probably existed many more languages,
more linguistic kernels or nodes, than we can perceive, both Indo-European and
non-Indo-European” (Evans 1981: 252). One must further reckon with the possi-
bility of koineization between co-territorial varieties following the reintegration
of groups that had formed in the course of earlier migrations all along the Indo-
European spread, with larger units in turn splitting up into new speech communities.
Regional linguistic correspondences may be due to (1) shared retentions from Proto-
Indo-European and/or (2) the diffusion of innovations from secondary centers
established by successive waves of emigrés out of the core speech community.
(3) So-called Wanderwörter (e.g. Neumann 1971: 96; Markey 1989b; Polomé 1992:
72; Vennemann 2003: 324; Salmons 2004) represent a special category of loanwords
that spread across languages, usually in connection with trade or the adoption of
external technological, economic, or cultural practices. It is also to be expected
that (4) cross-dialectal correspondences are either borrowings or convergences
resulting from contact between Indo-European groups that settled in adjacent
territories. But because we cannot establish with precision what position should
be accorded to Germanic in the Indo-European complex, it will be difficult in many
cases to know for sure whether a given correspondence came about due to common
heritage, parallel development in genetically related dialects, or transfer from one
language to another.
For expository purposes, we shall proceed from the hypothesis that the second
and first millennia BCE were a period of gradual divergence and contact between
the northwestern Indo-European dialects. We can divide the early Germanic
lexicon into essential components that reflect all four potential correspondence
sources previously identified.
(1) There is a considerable body of lexical items that are directly relatable to
Proto-Indo-European etyma, most notably in the core domains of society (i.e. its
settings and subdivisions) and economy (see Lehmann 1968).
(2) There are various sets of words that connect Germanic to other Indo-
European languages, either individually or in macrodialectal subgroups.
These two lexical components bleed into one another to the extent that the forms
in question may be derivable from roots that can be traced back to Proto-Indo-
European. However, Polomé (1972: 45) stresses that the latter category of words
is “particularly significant as indices of diachronically staggered areas of closer
relationship within the IE community.” Consider, for example, PIE *bhar- ‘spinous,
prickly’ (Markey 1984; 1989b: 589–93), *bhares- ‘barley’ (with *bhar- referring to
the ‘bristles of the ears’, as per Polomé 1992: 69), which are attested in west (Italic,
Celtic) and north-central (Germanic, Baltic, Slavic) Indo-European dialects and reflect
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412 Paul Roberge
a common cultural development: PGmc. *bariz-, in Go. barizeins ‘prepared with
barley’, ON barr ‘grain’, OE bere ‘barley’, beren ‘of barley’; Latin far, gen. farris ‘spelt,
grain, meal’, farina ‘meal, flour’, farreus ‘made of spelt or corn’; Russian bor
‘millet’ and possibly Old Church Slavonic braUAno ‘food’, Russian bóroUno ‘rye flour’;
Welsh/Cornish/Breton bara, Old Irish bairgen ‘bread’ (Pokorny 1959: 108–10;
Polomé 1970a: 57; 1972: 47; 1992: 69; Lehmann 1986: 62). The set may well rep-
resent a northwestern Indo-European Wortsippe designating ‘food derived from
cereals’ (Polomé 1972: 47). Barley and other grains were long known to the Indo-
Europeans. Polomé (1992: 69) points out that *bhar- could ultimately trace its
origin to a word belonging to a northern European substratum of the northwestern
Indo-European group. Markey (1989b: 393), however, suggests that a northern
European substrate term *b(h)e-u-, preserved in ON bygg, OE beow ‘grain, barley’,
coexisted with Indo-European *bhar-. If so, then *bhar- would be construed as a
purely descriptive term used to emphasize a characteristic quality in cereals (‘the
bearded, prickly grain’) as well as human facial hair (*bhar-dha‘beard’).
(3) Germanic also absorbed lexis (and associated items of material culture)
that traveled through contiguous Indo-European (and non-Indo-European) lan-
guage groups well after their individualization. The cultivation of hemp is prob-
ably Scythian in origin, and its introduction to Germanic areas (or at least
knowledge of the plant) antedates the Germanic consonant shift. Germanic
borrowed the Greek term káuuabiV ‘hemp’, perhaps by way of a neighboring
language (cf. Latin cannabis,cannabum), whence PGmc. *xanap- (<*kan(n)ab-, via
the Germanic consonant shift) yielding OHG hanaf, OS hanap, OE hænep, ON hampr
‘hemp’. A non-Indo-European etymon for *kannab- is certainly thinkable (cf.
Kuhn 1962: 123).
(4) As for lexical transfer between adjacent or co-territorial Indo-European
languages in northwestern Europe: The problem with the putative relationship
of Germanic with Illyrian and Venetic is that “the limitation of the available mater-
ial and the disputability of its interpretation, especially in the case of proper names,
make any far-reaching conclusion hazardous” (Polomé 1970b: 52). Some scholars
have discerned a close early connection of Germanic with Baltic and Slavic (cf.
van Coetsem 1970: 29; Porzig 1954: 92). But there seem to be just 10 to 20 old
Germanic loans in Baltic, by Koivulehto’s count (2002: 591), belonging to differ-
ent chronological layers; and several of these are thought to have passed through
Slavic, in which there are considerably more Germanic forms. Slavic borrowed
the Germanic word for ‘bread’ (PGmc. *xlaibaz), as attested by Old Church
Slavonic chlábA‘bread’. Lithuanian klJepas ‘loaf of bread’ is conventionally seen
as a younger loan via Belarusian (cf. Lehmann 1986: 186), though Koivulehto (2002:
592) raises the possibility of an older borrowing directly from Germanic, which,
a fortiori, would be compelling if Latvian klàips ‘bread’ is drawn from early
Germanic rather than from Gothic hlaifs, gen. hlaibis. Polomé (1972: 54) cautions
that “the acceptable lexical evidence exclusively shared by the Germanic, Baltic,
and Slavic tribes is hardly sufficient to draw any definite conclusions as to their
close relationship or even the level of civilization that they had reached at the
time of their contact.”
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 413
Germanic, Celtic, and Italic have preserved correspondences that are sugges-
tive of early contact between speakers of all three branches. Relations between
Italic and Germanic peoples during the Bronze Age are suggested by the fact that
Italic and Germanic (but not Celtic) share a common word for a metal: Latin aes,
aeris ‘copper, copper ore, money’, Go. aiz ‘money, metal coin’, ON eir ‘copper’,
OHG/OS er, OE ar,Fr‘ore’. After the southward migration of Italic groups from
the last third of the second millennium BCE, one might suppose that Celtic and
Germanic would have developed together for a longer period as closely related,
mutually intelligible dialects in a situation of contact (Pokorny 1936: 508). One
problematic aspect of this hypothesis is that there are no incontestible common
innovations between them in phonology and grammar, to the exclusion of the
other Indo-European branches; Germano-Celtic correspondences are confined to
the lexicon (Polomé 1972: 64; Evans 1981: 242–3). For Evans (1981: 252–3), this is
in itself a strong indication that the two groups were not in close association until
a fairly late period.
From 400 BCE to 100 BCE, the advance of Germanic peoples southward
brought them into contact with the Celts, who were moving north. It was once
believed that Celtic hegemony over the Germanic world accounted for a long list
of lexical correspondences (see Mees 2003: 18–19, 25–6 for references and discussion
of the older literature). Some contemporary scholars have averred that Germanic
must have occupied a culturally subordinate position with regard to Celtic
(Polomé 1972: 67; Lehmann 1977: 288–9; 1987: 80). Evans (1981: 253–4) insists
that there is no historical justification at all for assuming the domination of the
one group by the other, but cultural preeminence does not imply political
control (cf. Polomé 1985: 52). Salmons (1992: 95–6) observes that “subordinate”
lends itself to different interpretations ranging from “subjugated” to “less pres-
tigious.” Minimal “subordination” in the form of proximity to a somewhat more
advanced civilization in terms of technology and social organization – combined
with utility and/or novelty – would be sufficient motivation for lexical borrow-
ing. In later work Polomé (1987: 221) adopts a more conservative approach to
interpreting Germano-Celtic agreements in vocabulary: “The type of relationship
that existed between the Germanic people and the Celts is...hard to define by
linguistic means: when W. P. Lehmann [1987] argues from legal and institutional
terminology that the Celts were the givers and the less developed Germanic peo-
ple the receivers in the linguistic interchange, he may be overstating his case.”
Estimates of the Celtic Lehngut in early Germanic range from 50 or 60 items
(Salmons 1992: 96) to a mere 10 or fewer (Lane 1933: 263–4; Evans, 1981: 248). In
keeping with Polomé’s conservatism, shared terms are best considered cognates
belonging to a larger institutional framework of similar, possibly inherited, legal,
social, and political structures or reflecting common regional innovations and local-
ized archaisms – unless there is linguistic and/or cultural evidence for their being
borrowed (Polomé 1983: 281–2; 1987: 221). The Germanic term *rik- ‘ruler’ (Go
reiks [ri:ks] ‘ruler’, ON ríkr ‘mighty’, OHG masc. rihhi ‘ruler, king’, neut. rihhi ‘king-
dom’, etc.) is arguably an early borrowing from Celtic by virtue of its vocalism.
Since PIE *eis preserved in Proto-Germanic, PIE *reg- (Latin rex,regis) should be
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414 Paul Roberge
reflected by PGmc. *rek-, whereas in Celtic PIE *ewas raised to i, whence *rig-
‘ruler, king’, OIr. ri(gen. rig), Gaulish -rix. Note, too, that PGmc. *rik- shows the
effect of the Germanic consonant shift, when voiced stops became voiceless (*g >
*k). Other Germanic words that are widely accepted as Celtic loans include
PGmc. *ambahtaz ‘servant’ (Go. andbahts, with reanalysis of the first syllable as
the prefix and-, OE ambeht, OS ambahteo, OHG ambaht, ambahti ‘office’ >Modern
German Amt) <Celtic *ambaktos ‘member of the retinue of an important leader’
(Polomé 1985: 56–7) implied by Gallo-Latin ambactus (Caesar, Commentarii de
Bello Gallico, ch. 6, 15); and PGmc. *isarna- ‘iron’ (Go. eisarn, ON ísarn (via West
Germanic), OE isern, OS/OHG isarn) ~ *isar,*isan (OHG isan, OE iren), which may
be derived from a Celtic source (*isarno-), “since the only iron the Germanic world
was familiar with before the impact of Celtic metallurgy seems to be hematite,
the red iron ore designated by the term rauDi(: rauDa‘red’) in Old Norse”
(Polomé 1985: 57). Lexical transfer in the opposite direction, from Germanic into
Celtic, amounts to perhaps two or three examples (Lane 1933: 264), e.g. OIr. séol
‘piece of cloth, sail’, Welsh hwyl ‘sail’ from Gmc. *segla- (ON/OE segl, OS segel,
OHG segal ‘sail’), although the hypothesis that ‘sail’ is a Germanic loanword in
Celtic is not altogether satisfactory in Evans’ view (1981: 250–1).
6 Language Contact Following the Breakup of
Proto-Germanic
Lehmann (1977: 285; similarly, 1968: 4–5) claims that one of the most notable char-
acteristics of the Germanic branch is its lack of dialect differences at the time of
Proto-Germanic: “The unity of Germanic is striking when compared for example
with the diversity of Greek.” This uniformity is best accounted for by assuming
“a stable cohesive community, presumably that located around the Baltic for a
millennium or more.” Major innovations – such as the fixation of accent, the
Germanic consonant shift (Grimm’s Law), and adjectival inflection (strong/weak)
based on definiteness rather than stem class – diffused across the entire speech
community; dialect differences arose in Germanic at a late period. Yet, imputation
of a single, unified speech community largely free of dialect variation to Germanic
prehistory (Lehmann 1968: 4; 1977: 285–6) is probably an oversimplification (cf.
Polomé 1972: 45).
The actual situation may have been more akin to a chain of interrelated
dialects with no clear internal boundaries. The traditional visualization of such a
unity incrementally fracturing into three discrete subgroups (North, West, and
East Germanic) without contact or mutual influence has long been abandoned
(Kufner 1972: 94–5; Scardigli 2002). Although there are isoglosses that connect North
and East Germanic, North and West Germanic exhibit a numerically preponderant
set of linguistic affinities that are not shared by East Germanic and are more heav-
ily weighted in their probative value. East and West Germanic have virtually no
isoglosses in common with each other, save for some pronominal forms in Gothic
and Old High German (Go. 3 sg. masc. nom. sg. is, acc. sg. ina, OHG ir/er,in(an)
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 415
beside OS he, ina(n), OE he, hine; ON nom./acc. hann). A period of common devel-
opment in North and West Germanic languages after the migration of the Goths
from eastern Scandinavia is widely assumed, at least as a working hypothesis (e.g.
Kuhn 1955; Antonsen 1965: 36; Kufner 1972: 94; Haugen 1976: 111–12; Ringe 2006:
213). For its part, Gothic developed more or less separately along the shores
of the Baltic Sea, east of the Vistula, from the second century BCE to the second
century CE. Intermediate relationships in Germanic, which have long been the
subject of scholarly debate (see especially Nielsen 1989: ch. 4 for a critical review
of the literature), do not directly concern us here. Suffice it to say that Germanic
peoples “lived at various times after the PGmc. stage in differing constellations
of proximity, [and] retained close contacts with each other even after migrations,
so that linguistic borrowing [between dialects] is likely to have taken place for
long periods of time” (Kufner 1972: 74).
With fragmentation into dialects and increasing temporal remove from the ances-
tral language, the concept Germanic comes to refer not to a historical object but
rather a genetic affiliation. The history of contact in Germanic languages becomes
the diachronic record of discrete speech communities, the outcomes of which depend
on the nature, duration, and intensity of the linguistic encounters. Salmons (1992:
90) makes essentially this point when he writes that by the early Roman period,
Celtic–Germanic contacts cover much less territory than earlier contacts might have,
indicating greater complexity.
The evidence from the historical sources makes it clear that in Roman times
contact continued between Celts and Germanic peoples living along the common
frontier between them. Caesar described Gaul at the time of his conquests (58–51
BCE) as being divided into three parts inhabited by the Aquitani, the Gauls (who
in their own language are the Celts), and the Belgae, each differing from the other
in language, customs, and laws (Commentarii de Bello Gallico, ch. 1, 1). His sources
informed him that one Belgic tribe, the Remi, are descended from Germanic
peoples whose forebears had crossed the Rhine to settle in a more fertile region,
driving out the Gaulish natives; this tribe is said to have resisted the Cimbri and
Teutoni, who would go on to harry Roman territories from ca. 113–101 BCE Other
Belgic tribes – the Condrusi, Eburones, Caeroesi, Paemani – are also said to be of
Germanic descent (Commentarii de Bello Gallico, ch. 2, 4; ch. 6, 32). Caesar’s report
has fueled a great deal of speculation over whether the Belgae were an ethnically
mixed Gaulish–Germanic group (e.g. de Vries 1960: 51). Tacitus retreated some-
what from his (in)famous supposition that the Germani were an ethnically
homogeneous, indigenous people (Germania, chs. 2 and 4) when he alludes to migra-
tion, mixing, and language shift on the part of certain groups.
During the first centuries of the common era, Latin was the medium of com-
munication in the “vertical” domains of administration, cultured discourse, and
the military in territories west of the Rhine and south of the Danube. One is tempted
to conjecture that there must have been a Latin-based lingua franca or trade
jargon – mixed with Germanic and Gaulish forms – along the long frontier
between the Roman Empire and unoccupied Germania and along the North Sea
coast. Unfortunately, that question is largely moot. Roman authors took little
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416 Paul Roberge
interest in linguistic matters; “the amount of information we have about the com-
plex language situation in the Empire is appallingly poor” (Polomé 1980: 193).
Multilingualism was probably the norm in the Roman towns and trading centers
along the Rhine, Moselle, Meuse, and Danube, and among Germanic tribes reset-
tled on Roman territory, like the Ubii (cf. Polomé 1980: 194).
The domination of the Romans and the preeminence of their culture assured
that the influence of Latin would be substantial. Northern Gaul and Roman
Germania were constitutive of an economic and cultural sphere within the
Roman Empire, out of which a plethora of Latin loanwords entered West
Germanic dialects in the domains of administration (OHG keisar ‘emperor’ <Latin
caesar), the military (OE comp, OHG kampf ‘battle’ <Latin campus ‘plain, field,
battlefield’), the domestic sphere (OE pytt, OHG pfuzzi, MHG pfütze ‘well, pit’
<put-tius <putjus <Latin puteus), commerce (OS munita, OE mynet, OHG
munizza ‘coin’, MHG münze <Latin moneta ‘coined metal, money’), and agricul-
ture (OHG/OS fruht ‘fruit’ <Latin fructus ), and some days of the week (e.g. dies
Saturni, English Saturday, Dutch zaterdag). The early adoption and nativization
of these words are indicated by the effects of the West Germanic consonant
gemination, the High German consonant shift, and umlaut. While the assimila-
tion of -mp- to -pp- in ON kapp ‘contest, ardour’ is indicative of a relatively early
borrowing, Latin loans in Old Norse are generally later and mediated by contacts
with northern German (ON fruktr ‘fruit’) or English (ON mynt ‘coin’, pyttr ‘pit,
pool’, though on the latter see de Vries, 1977: 430–1). Loan exchange in the oppo-
site direction, from Germanic to Latin, was negligible.
The first direct testimonials to any kind of Germanic language are inscriptions
in the runic orthography beginning in the first century CE, most of which were
found in present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, but with scattered finds
in Germany, France, and eastern Europe, along the route of East Germanic
migrations. The prevailing theories on the origin of the writing system tend to
fall into three categories: (1) it is an adaptation of – or autonomous creation inspired
by – the Latin alphabet, on the impetus of increased cultural contact at the turn
of the present era between Germanic peoples and Romans living along the Rhine;
(2) it is based on North Etruscan epigraphic practice that reached northern
populations along the amber trade route between Italy and the Baltic coast;
(3) it is derivable from a Mediterranean script (Latin or Greek) that was imported
to the north by sea rather than passing through the European continent by land
(cf. Antonsen 2002: 116). Whichever position one favors, one must recognize that
individuals in the borrowing oral culture had to have learned the language(s) of
the literate culture and did not casually imitate a foreign writing system.
7 The Migration Period (ca. 200–600 CE)
The emergence of the Germanic peoples upon the scene of recorded history “as
a progressively intrusive migratory movement was one of the most fundamental
ethnographic events in early European history. Quite obviously, the cultural face
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 417
of Europe was to be forever altered by this intrusion” (Markey 1986: 248–9). The
origins and causes of Völkerwanderung are variously identified as overpopulation
and competition for resources in the homeland, coastal inundation due to climate
change, the whiff of wealth from the south, and a power vacuum created by a
Roman Empire in retreat and inexorable decline. The linguistic consequences were
language shift, language death, and language spread.
Early in the present era a number of Germanic tribes settled in the eastern Baltic
region and along the Elbe migrated southward. At about 200 CE, the Goths left
their homeland along the lower Vistula and settled in the plains north of the Black
Sea, eventually occupying a swath of territory between the mouth of the Danube
and the Don River. One major group, the Visigoths pressed into Dacia and caused
a Roman withdrawal from the province (275). The Hunnic invasions (from ca. 370)
forced the Visigoths to take refuge in Lower Moesia (now eastern Bulgaria). Under
Alaric (ca. 370–410), they marched into Greece and Italy, sacking Rome in 410,
and from there wandered through southern Gaul into the Iberian peninsula,
reaching southern Spain by ca. 415. Three years later they re-entered Gaul and
established a kingdom at Toulouse that encompassed Aquitania and Narbonne.
Visigothic expansion was checked by the Franks under Clovis I (ca. 466–511) in
the Vouillé in 507. Meanwhile, the other major group, the Ostrogoths, recovered
their independence after the repulse of the Huns in 451 in the Battle of Chalons
and the death of Attila (406–53). They penetrated southeastern Europe and in 493,
under Theodoric (454–526), overthrew Odoacer (436–93), the first Germanic king
of Italy, seizing Ravenna as their capital. In 535 the Byzantine emperor Justinian I
(ca. 482–565) commissioned a war of restoration in the former Western Empire.
With the final defeats of the Ostrogoths in the 550s and the end of Visigothic
domination after the Moorish conquest of Spain (711), the Goths disappear from
history.
The Vandals (Vandilii in Tacitus, Germania, ch. 2) were a collective East Germanic
group that, like the Goths, appear to have had their origins in Scandinavia (pre-
sumably Jutland). In the last quarter of the third century, the Vandals migrated
south into Dacia and Pannonia. Under pressure from the Huns, they entered Gaul
(406) with the support of another Germanic group, the Suebi, and both groups
crossed the Pyrenees into Hispania in 409–10. The incursion of the Visigoths spelled
the absorption of the Suebi and forced the Vandals into northern Africa where
they besieged Hippo in 430 and captured Carthage in 439. Over the next three
and a half decades the Vandals raided the coastal areas of the Eastern and
Western Empires, sacking Rome in 455. The restoration of imperial control over
northern Africa in 534 meant the expulsion, dispersal, and enslavement of the
Vandals. During the course of the third century, the Burgundians – yet another
East Germanic group, the origins of which are traditionally fixed in Scandinavia
(to wit, the island of Bornholm) – drifted westward from their secondary home
in the Vistula basin. By the mid fifth century they had settled in what is today
the French-speaking part of Switzerland and in the south of the French Jura around
Geneva. From there they occupied Lyon and then spread out over the Rhone region
toward the south. The Langobards, a Herminonic group, departed from the Elbe
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418 Paul Roberge
and established themselves in northern Italy in 568, in the aftermath of the
ruinous Ostrogothic wars. Their kingdom fell to Charlemagne in 774.
The philological record for Mediterranean Germanic is sparse. Native texts
are extant only for Gothic, which is represented by the fourth-century New
Testament translation of the Visigothic bishop Wulfila (ca. 310–83) – preserved
in manuscripts from the late fifth and sixth centuries – alongside remnants of a
commentary on the gospel of John and minor fragments. Some of these documents
very probably originated in Italy, others perhaps in southern France or in the Danube
region. For the other Mediterranean Germanic dialects, we have only the isolated
words and names that are recorded in historical and geographic writings from
Late Antiquity. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose that Germanic language
varieties exported south of the Alps, to northern Africa, and to the Balkans were
conglomerations of dialects with varying degrees of koineization and mutual
intelligibility, already “well mixed and stirred before or immediately after
confrontation with the non-Germanic languages of the Mediterranean basin”
(Markey 1989a: 62). Though it shares certain features with Upper German of the
time, Langobardian is known to have included in its ranks Franks, Saxons,
Goths, Burgundians, Gepids, the last of the Rugians (an East Germanic tribe)
defeated by Odoacer in Noricum (487), as well as various non-Germanic peoples
(cf. Markey 1989a). Biblical Gothic evinces Greek influence in the design of the
writing system, lexis, and word order; occasional Latinisms are also discernible.
Van Coetsem (2000: 200–12) characterizes the structure of Gothic as “eminently
Germanic,” even though it has accelerated a pre-existing trend toward what
he calls “regularization” (reduction in the number of inflectional and morpho-
phonological variants) and “uniformization” (reduction in the number of categorial
distinctions, primarily in morphology). The accelerating factor obtains from the
unstable social situation implied by migration, interaction with other languages,
and the absence of institutional norm enforcement. Even so, the extent to which
the high variety of religious texts reflects vernacular forms of the language is debat-
able. Generally, Germanic Mediterraneans were transitory, minority superstrata
that were absorbed into the indigenous populations, leaving only slight onomastic
and lexical traces. That the Flemish nobleman Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq (ca.
1520–92) could interview two semi-speakers of Gothic in Constantinople in the
early 1560s leads us to think that some Gothic settlements may have existed as
late as the sixteenth century in the Crimea. Elsewhere, the enclavement that pro-
motes language maintenance on foreign soil was never a significant long-term
factor.
Meanwhile, two Germanic groups of composite origin appear on the scene in
the third century. The Alamanni (‘all men’) were an amalgamation of Germanic
tribes between the upper Danube and the middle Rhine who entered into
prolonged conflict with the Romans. Between 300 and 450, they pressured and
eventually succeeded in occupying Roman territories in southwestern Germany,
present-day Switzerland, and Alsace. Another tribal confederation, the Franks,
moved into Germania Inferior and northern Gaul during the fifth century. In 486
Clovis became the absolute ruler of a large kingdom of mixed Germanic and
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 419
Romance populations, one that would over the next several decades incorporate
the Alamanni and Bavarians. By 537 virtually the whole of Gaul was under the
authority of the Franks, by which time the Gaulish language was on the cusp of
extinction. Romance and Germanic vernaculars mingled with one another in the
plurilingual areas of Gaul during Merovingian times. Assimilation of the Frankish
superstratum proceeded from the Latinization of vertical communication (i.e.
between supraregional institutions and local units) starting in the fifth century
to the Romanization of horizontal communication (between and within local
affiliations) by the eighth century; cf. Banniard (1996), van Durme (2002: 12). The
Strasbourg Oaths of 842, in which two sons of Ludwig the Pious (778–840) swore
allegiance to one another against their older brother Lothar in the language of
the army of the other – Ludwig-fils in Gallo-Romance and his half-brother Charles
in German – are emblematic of the formation of a linguistic border.
The Bavarians are an Elbe-Germanic group (descended perhaps from the
Marcomanni) that entered history after they crossed the limes in the mid sixth
century. Their name appears to be derived from that of a Celtic tribe, the Boii,
which would suggest Bohemia as their initial expansion area. A handful of
lexical agreements raise the possibility of ancillary contact with Gothic with the
introduction of Christianity, e.g. Go. paraskaiwe ‘preparation’ (Greek paraskEún),
OHG (Bavarian) pherintag ‘Friday’; OHG sambaztag ‘Saturday’ (Modern German
Samstag), Go. sabbato dags ‘day of rest’.
The North Sea coast served as the staging area for yet another great migration
that gave rise to the first permanent extraterritorial Germanic language of the com-
mon era. This population movement began with the Saxons (yet another merged
group that first appears in the mid second century), who raided northern Gaul
and southeastern England from the latter part of the third century. The emigra-
tion of small parties of North Sea Germanic peoples across the English Channel
from the early to mid fifth century intensified into a large-scale colonization of
Britain by Saxons, Angles, Frisians, and Jutes. The linguistic consequences for the
Romano-Celtic population were rather more pernicious than was the case in speech
communities once dominated by Germanic Mediterraneans. As early as the fifth
century, Latin faded away along with the Roman superstratum that introduced
its language. For Britons who were not killed or displaced during the invasions,
the Anglo-Saxon conquest meant asymmetrical bilingualism, gradual language
shift, and eventual assimilation. The areas occupied by the southwestern Britons
were reduced by the expansion of Wessex in the centuries following the Battle of
Deorham in 577. Further to contact and the early history of English, see Filppula
(this volume).
8 The Projection of Norse and Norman Power
(ca. 700–1100)
Norse expeditions of the so-called Viking Age were an exercise in wealth accu-
mulation by multiple means – trade, piracy, colonization – that were enabled by
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420 Paul Roberge
advances in maritime technology. Of linguistic significance is the exportation of
North Germanic varieties of the period, known collectively as the dCnsk tunga lit.
‘Danish’ but more precisely ‘Norse tongue’ (Bibire 2001: 89), to territories outside
of mainland Scandinavia. Norse was introduced to the eastern shores of the Baltic,
Finland, and deep into Russia, where Swedish traders known as rus (ostensibly
derivable from Finnish Ruotsi ‘Sweden’, ON róDr‘rowing’) and Scandinavian mer-
cenaries constituted a superstratum that melted into the Slavic population after
the mid tenth century. It is unclear to what extent the Swedish spoken natively
by nearly 300,000 people in Finland and once spoken in Estonia (until World War
II) derives from language spread during the Viking Age vis-à-vis secondary
migration in the Middle Ages (Barnes 2005: 183).
The ninth century saw an influx of (mainly) Norwegians in Shetland, Orkney,
the Hebrides, Isle of Man, parts of Scotland and Ireland, the Faroe Islands, and
Iceland. In areas where settlement was dense and the immigrants formed cohe-
sive polities, Norse may have continued in use for many generations. In the first
two offshore island groups and on the north coast of mainland Scotland, a
descendant of the immigrant language called Norn was maintained until the eigh-
teenth century. But as a rule, Norse disappeared, though not without leaving its
mark on the local languages to which it succumbed. Only in the hitherto sparsely
populated Faroes and Iceland did Norse take permanent root and develop into
new languages. Icelanders and Norwegians established toeholds in Greenland
(ca. 986) and from there explored parts of eastern Canada. From archeological
evidence, it appears that there was robust trade between the Greenlandic
Norse and native people, which hints at an erstwhile jargon. Today, the sporadic
Old Norse loanwords in Inuktitut (catalogued by van der Voort 1996) are the
monument to the Norse speech community in Greenland, which perished in the
fifteenth century.
Danish and Norwegian invaders settled in the north and east of England
between 865 and 955. The campaigns (991–4) of Olaf Tryggvason (later king of
Norway, d. 1000) and King Svein Forkbeard (960–1011) of Denmark installed
Danish sovereignty over England, which would continue through the reigns of
Svein’s son Canute (1014–35) and grandson Harthacanute, who died without
issue in 1042. During this same period, the Danish (Norwegian?) chieftain Rollo
(ca. 860–932) and his descendants consolidated and expanded their hold on
Normandy, only to have their community become part of the French-speaking
stream.
Our knowledge of what was surely an intense contact situation in the English
Danelaw is grounded in inferences made from the heavy borrowing of content
words (e.g. Modern English egg, sky,ill, take, get,die from ON egg, sky‘cloud’, illr
‘evil, bad’, taka, geta, deyja via OE diegan, replacing steorfan, which survives in Modern
English starve) along with some closed-class functional items, viz. the prepositions
till, fro (in to and fro) <ON til,frá ‘from’, and 3 pl. pronouns they, them,their <
ON ¶eir,¶eim, ¶eirra (supplanting OE nom./acc. pl. hie, dat. pl. him, gen. pl.
hira/heora), and place-name elements (e.g. -by, ON byr‘farm, town’). The presence
of Norse speakers may have facilitated the selection of are <Midland/Northern
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 421
ME are(n) <OE (Mercian) earon (cf. ON 1 pl. erum, 2 pl. eruD, 3 pl. eru) at the expense
of the southern plural present indicative form of ‘be’ (OE sindon, sint). Language
shift from Norse to English in the Danelaw was probably largely complete by 1100
(Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 267, 282).
French-speaking Normans with Breton and Flemish allies conquered England
between 1066 and 1070 and proceeded to Ireland a century later. As the language
of the court, the higher nobility, of the legal and ecclesiastical superstructure, and
of European culture, French enjoyed enormous prestige until well into the four-
teenth century, by which time the resident body of French speakers in England
had become largely assimilated. English came to acquire an immense number of
French borrowings (as well as Latin and Greek forms through the medium of
French) along with a considerable amount of nonnative derivational morphology
(e.g. in-,-ive,-(at)ion,-al,-ic,-ity,-ment, etc.) with accompanying morphophono-
logy (/d ~ S/ in accede : accession, /d ~ Z/ in decide : decision, /k ~ s/ in electric :
electricity, /t ~ Z/ in equate : equation). Some morphemes are restricted to combi-
nations with other borrowed elements (-ceive, as in perceive,receive,deceive), while
others can combine with varying degrees of freedom with native or non-Latinate
morphemes (drinkable,nonwhite,remake,botheration,de-Baathify).
The Norse and Norman contribution to the development of English has been
thoroughly described in the standard handbooks and in the essay by Filppula
in the present volume. Suffice to note here some points of episodic controversy.
Some linguists would relate the lexical replacement (relexification), inflectional
simplification, and concomitant analycity (with fixed SVO order) that we observe
in Middle English to parallel phenomena in language contact situations that give
rise to creoles (cf. Milroy 1984: 11; though see now Milroy 2007: 17–18).
Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 263– 342) devote a not inconsiderable portion
of their seminal study to demonstrating four overarching theses: (1) Although the
Norse influence on English was pervasive, affecting all parts of the grammar, it
was not deep, except in the lexicon (p. 302); creolization is not required to explain
the facts of English in the Danelaw. (2) Norse did not stimulate inflectional
simplification in English, which was in progress well before external influences
became a factor (p. 303); similarly, Allen (1997), who does see language contact
as playing a role in the acceptance of internally motivated deflection. (3) With
respect to French, the linguistic consequences for English amount to nothing more
than normal borrowing by a substrate language in a situation of occasional bilin-
gualism. That French did not reach very far beyond the higher domains would
undercut Dalton-Puffer’s (1995) thought experiment that the transition to Middle
English is equatable with imperfect (due to unstable bilingualism) communal
shift away from a “dying” (i.e. recessive) majority language (Old English) to a
dominant minority language (Norman French). (4) Finally, English is not
significantly more “foreignized” or simplified than Danish, Swedish, Dutch, or
northern Low German (Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 321).
Occupying the middle ground is O’Neil (1978), who distinguishes between the
simplification of the English morphosyntactic system prior to contact with Norse
and the neutralization of superficial aspects (e.g. inflection) belonging to two closely
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422 Paul Roberge
related co-territorial systems. Picking up this thread, Dawson (2003) characterizes
the outcome of the contact situation in eastern and northern England as a koine,
which was enabled by a close genetic relationship and (hence) typological prox-
imity between English and Norse. McWhorter (2002; 2005: ch. 11) acknowledges
that there are no grounds for treating English as a creole but nevertheless con-
tends that extensive second language acquisition by Scandinavians did in fact
simplify English grammar to a considerable extent. Similar arguments for heavy
influence from Irish on English, but not creolization, are put forward in the detailed
study found in Hickey (1997).
9 Superposition
The introduction of Christianity placed Latin in a privileged relationship with respect
to the metropolitan Germanic languages, if only in specific domains, as hagiolect,
the language of literacy, and as a quasi-official language of state. The period of
Latin superposition commenced with the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England,
from the beginning of the seventh century, and the establishment of monastic
culture. It is bracketed by the northern Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, during which Latin served as a language of learned disquisition.
Latin contributed religious and specialized terminology to the local Germanic
languages, and it also exerted influences on vernacular written style. With the
vernacularization of literacy, the Bible, and official documents, which took place
at different times and under different circumstances in Germanic-speaking regions,
the position of Latin gradually attenuated. The Roman Catholic church, however,
continued to use Latin for liturgical purposes and for official purposes.
The Hanseatic League united Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, and other northern
German cities in an alliance for the purpose of mutual trade and protection. The
cartel came to dominate mercantile activity in the North Sea and Baltic between
1250 and 1450. The importance of Middle Low German as a medium of commu-
nication in the domains of commerce, law, and administration secured its long-
term prestige and influence in Visby, Stockholm, Kalmar, Bergen, and other
emerging cities in Scandinavia. Through widespread bilingualism within the
merchant class and civil bureaucracy and significant German presence in urban
areas, the Middle Low German imprint on Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish is
every bit as deep as that of French on English (Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 315;
Braunmüller 2000). As the Protestant Reformation got under way in Germany in
1517, High German eclipsed Low German as an important source of loanwords
in the north.
10 Yiddish
Yiddish represents a case of migration and language genesis, though the details
of its origin are contested. A long-held view (Weinreich1980) is that from roughly
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 423
1000, Jews speaking Loez (a Judeo-Romance language originating in France)
settled in German-speaking areas along the Rhine. The newcomers created their
own ethnoloect through the fusion of Hebrew-Aramaic, Loez, and German. As
Ashkenazic Jews moved east, starting in the mid thirteenth century, a Slavic com-
ponent was fused to the vernacular. Weinreich’s model of Yiddish formation has
given way to a more recent view that posits separate origins for the westernmost
varieties in the Rhineland (Loter) and fixes the origins of Yiddish further east,
based on the presence of Bavarian (and to a lesser extent East Central German)
features in the German component of Yiddish. Wexler’s (1991) hypothesis that
Yiddish arose via the relexification of Judeo-Slavic by German-speaking Ashkenazic
Jews is radical and controversial.
11 Hybridized Mediums of Interethnic
Communication in the European Metropole
German gradually spread eastward from the ninth century until its abrupt retreat
after World War II. One consequence was the creation of German-speaking
Sprachinseln in Russia, the Czech and Slovak republics, Slovenia, Hungary, and
Romania (e.g. the Siebenbürger Sachsen). But another consequence was the genesis
of transitory restructured forms of German used for interethnic communication.
Halbdeutsch refers to interlanguage versions of German spoken by Estonians and
Latvians from the late Middle Ages through the nineteenth century (Stammler
1922; Mitzka 1923; Lehiste 1965). Mitrovic(1972) describes a German-based pidgin
that crystalized in Bosnia during the late nineteenth century among workers from
all parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Russenorsk was a seasonal pidgin used by Norwegians and Russians involved
in the fish trade in northern Norway from the late eighteenth century up until
the Russian revolution of 1917. Its lexicon is drawn in roughly equal measure from
the two stock languages, though there are also lexical items from Sami, Low
German/Dutch, French, Swedish, and English (Broch & Jahr 1984; Jahr 1996: 110).
Broch (1996) calls attention to an English–Russian trade jargon at Archangel on
the White Sea during the second half of the eighteenth century.
In our century countries like Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom,
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are still considered “monolingual” but have a
vast array of languages spoken within their borders. Of particular interest to
linguists are the verbal repertoires of immigrants. The best-known case is that of
Foreign Worker German, which is spoken by laborers who have migrated from
southern Europe and Turkey since the late 1950s. Some studies (Clyne 1968; Gilbert
& Pavlou 1994) have characterized Foreign Worker German as an industrial
pidgin on the basis of its structural properties and obstacles to targeted second
language acquisition due to the ghettoization of its speakers. However, the
current consensus is that the German of these immigrants has been constitutive
of a continuum of interlanguage varieties (Klein & Dittmar 1979; Hinnenkamp
Hickey, R. (Ed.). (2010). The handbook of language contact. ProQuest Ebook Central <a
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424 Paul Roberge
1984), which is being superseded by ambilingualism in generations born in the
host countries.
12 Germanic Languages beyond the
European Metropole
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Portugal and Spain commissioned
exploratory voyages and the establishment of trading outposts in West Africa,
the Americas, and Asia. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the enterprise
became one of political domination, conquest, and colonization. Other maritime
European nation-states – most importantly, France, England, and the Netherlands
– and private interests operating therefrom became part of a large-scale movement
of people and exportation of economic and cultural practices, which transformed,
if not disrupted indigenous linguistic ecologies.
From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, England spread its
language more widely ex patria than any other European imperial power (Hickey
2004). “Neo-European” and indigenized varieties of English, along with English-
lexified pidgins and creoles (the latter in colonies that put in place economies
based on plantation agriculture utilizing nonindigenous slave or in some cases
indentured labor) are grouped by region – North America, the Caribbean basin,
Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific – and assigned separate chapters in this
handbook.
Despite a far-flung commercial empire extending from North America to
Indonesia by the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch linguistic legacy
overseas is comparatively modest. In New Jersey and New York vestiges of New
Netherland (1614–74) Dutch survived into the early twentieth century, including
a subdialect that was spoken by descendants of slaves. Today, Dutch has official
status in Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba. There are but three known
Dutch-lexified creoles in the Caribbean. Negerhollands was spoken on St. Thomas
and St. John in the US Virgin Islands, which were originally settled by Dutch planters
and their slaves (in 1672 and 1717, respectively). Its last fluent speaker died in
1987. Two other Dutch-lexified creoles were developed in Guyana during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by people living along the Berbice and
Essequibo Rivers. Berbice Creole Dutch is on the brink of extinction, while Skepi
Creole Dutch became extinct by 1998. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company estab-
lished a station at the Cape of Good Hope. Three groups were responsible for the
formation of a semicreolized Cape Dutch Vernacular during the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries: Dutch, German, and French settlers; the indigenous
Khoekhoe; and enslaved peoples of African and Asian origin (from 1658). By
the mid nineteenth century, the sectarian Muslim community in Cape Town had
developed a tradition of composing religious texts in the Cape Dutch Vernacular,
using Arabic orthography. Starting in the 1870s, Afrikaner nationalists cultivated
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Contact and the History of Germanic Languages 425
their own dialect – which they called Afrikaans – as a written medium and pro-
moted its use in domains hitherto reserved for English or Dutch. This movement
culminated in standardization and official recognition in 1925.
Secondary immigration brought Dutch to the American Midwest (Michigan,
Wisconsin, Iowa) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the language
gradually fell out of regular use and has largely vanished. More or less contem-
poraneous Norwegian and Swedish immigrant communities in the United States
Upper Midwest and Canada have shown similar patterns of shift to English since
the 1920s.
Due to emigration, German is spoken in North America, South America (Brazil,
Argentina, Paraguay), and southern Africa. Germans arrived in Philadelphia in
large numbers soon after its establishment in the 1680s and fanned out across
Pennsylvania and then southward into parts of Appalachia, comprising the
largest non-English-speaking European group by the American revolution in 1776.
Pennsylvania German remains the home language of roughly a quarter million
bilingual descendants in sectarian Anabaptist communities in the United States
(Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Indiana, among other states) and Canada
(mainly southern Ontario). These speakers have retained the Early Modern
founder dialect (Pfälzisch) of their forebears, suitably koineized and adlexified
by American English. From the 1840s, massive secondary German immigration
created German-speaking enclaves in the American Midlands (especially Ohio,
Wisconsin, and Iowa) and Texas that had their span but have for the most part
given up the heritage language in favor of English.
Germany’s bid for an overseas colonial empire was late and short-lived
(1871–1918). Its linguistic legacy consists of a settler dialect of German still spoken
as a first language in the former colony of South West Africa (now Namibia) and
incipient German-lexified pidgins that are attested in Kiautschou and Papua
New Guinea from the late nineteenth century up to the outbreak of World War
I in 1914 (see Mühlhäusler 1980; 1984). Residue from the earlier German pidgin
is preserved in Tok Pisin raus ‘get out’, gumi ‘rubber, tube’, beten ‘worship, pray’
(German heraus,Gummi,beten). Unserdeutsch is the autonym for a restructured,
creolelike variety of German that developed in a mission school and orphanage
near Rabaul, in Papua New Guinea, and is now endangered (Volker 1991).
NOTE
1 The following abbreviations are used in this chapter:
Go Gothic OIr Old Irish
ME Middle English ON Old Norse
MHG Middle High German OS Old Saxon
OE Old English PGmc Proto Germanic
OHG Old High German PIE Proto-Indo-European
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426 Paul Roberge
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