The Germanic languages (including also the Scandinavian, Dutch, Flemish, and English languages) are descended from a common prehistoric ancestor referred to by linguists as “proto-Germanic”. “Proto-Germanic” is itself a branch of the Indo-European family of languages that also includes the Celtic, Italic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Baltic, Armenian, Iranian, and Indic language groups.

Earliest archaeological findings establish that around 750 B.C. Germanic tribes were concentrated in southern Scandinavia and along the North Sea and Baltic coasts from what is now the Netherlands to the Vistula River. Over the next 500 years, they spread southward along the Rhine and Elbe rivers and into the Danube river valley, wandered southeast along the Vistula River, and ultimately to the shores of the Black Sea. This brought enormous linguistic diversity and variations of pronunciation and grammatical usage that resulted in the emergence of separate Scandinavian, German, Gothic (now extinct), and later also Netherlandic (Flemish, Dutch) and English branches of the Germanic language group.

During the 1st century B.C., portions of the territory then occupied by the Germanic tribes were conquered by the armies of the expanding Roman Empire. Some of these regions later became parts of modern Germany (western portion), Austria, and Switzerland. The Roman cities of Colonia, Confluentia, Trivium, and Vindobona, for example, founded at this period, survive today as the modern German and Austrian cities of Cologne (Köln), Koblenz, Trier, and Vienna (Wien).

The earliest written records of any Germanic language are isolated words and names cited by Latin authors of the 1st century B.C. From 200 A.D., Germanic carved inscriptions are found using a 24-letter “runic” alphabet. The official conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in 312 A.D. slowly led to the Christianization of all the Germanic tribes over succeeding centuries, launching the establishment of their tongues as written (as against oral) literary languages, as the Bible was translated for local use.

In the region of what are today Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the Germanic tongues (having already absorbed some important Latin “culture” words during Roman times --for example kaufen = to buy, from Latin caupo = merchant, shopkeeper) subsequently underwent changes in grammar and pronunciation that created the spoken forms of modern German. These fall into two main groups, corresponding to a geographical divide: so-called Low German (“Plattdeutsch”, spoken in the low-lying coastal plain area that forms the northern half of Germany), and High German (“Hochdeutsch”, spoken in the upland plateau and mountainous region that forms the southern half of Germany and all of Austria and Switzerland). Within Low German and High German there are many local variations that form a continuum of change in pronunciation and idiom from south to north.

But a clear break is apparent along the line of demarcation where the upland plateau of southern Germany falls away to the north-German plain. A “standard” form of German was evolved in early modern times, at first as a written language modeled on that of the German translation of the Bible made by Martin Luther in the early 1500’s. This was a language that corresponded essentially to the spoken dialect of Luther’s home region of Saxony -- a so-called “East Middle German” dialect that combined features of High German and Low German, and was thus found convenient for communication between the governments of the many postage-stamp-sized principalities that then formed the feudal political landscape of the German-speaking world.

It is an irony of the history of the German language that, although the migration of Germanic tribes fleeing attacks by nomadic invaders from Central Asia led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the immediate replacement of the Empire by states ruled by a feudal aristocracy of largely Germanic extraction did not lead to the dominance of German on the continent of Europe. The most politically and militarily successful of the migrating Germanic tribes – the Franks, the Langobards, the Allemanni, and the Visigoths – all abandoned their Germanic languages in favor of the popular Latin spoken by the indigenous populations of the Roman territories they overran and subsequently governed.

Indeed, the so-called “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” founded in 800 A.D. by Charlemagne, a French king of Frankish origin, vigorously promoted the use not of German, but of church Latin as a unifying force throughout a Christian Western Europe that was feeling the chronic threat of invasion by Islamic armies. The subsequent history of this Holy Roman Empire likewise made only a very late and precarious contribution to the spread of German within Europe. When Charlemagne’s French-speaking dynasty died out and was replaced by one that that actually spoke a form of German (the Hohenstauffen), the territory of France was severed from the imperial package.