Map of germanic languages.

██ Low Franconian (West Germanic)
██ Low German (West Germanic)
██ Central German (High German, West Germanic)
██ Upper German (High German, West Germanic)
██ Anglic (Anglo-Frisian, West Germanic)
██ Frisian (Anglo-Frisian, West Germanic)
██ East North Germanic
██ West North Germanic
██ Line dividing the North and West Germanic languages.

From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are traditionally divided into three groups, West, East and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration period, so that some individual varieties are difficult to classify. The Western group would have formed as a variety of Proto-Germanic in the late Jastorf culture (ca. 1st century BC). The group is characterized by not having "hardened" the *-ww- / *-jj- groups due to Holtzmann's law, a development observed in variants in both East and North Germanic. In the classification of Friedrich Maurer (1943), there is no single linguistic unit classifiable as "West Germanic": the term rather refers to all groups that belong neither to the Northern nor to the Eastern group, and comprises

North Sea Germanic (Ingvaeonic, ancestral to Anglo-Frisian and Low Saxon)
Elbe Germanic (Irminonic, ancestral to High German)
Weser-Rhine Germanic (ancestral to Old Frankish)

There is no academic consensus on the question whether these groups more closely related to one another than to the Northern or Eastern dialects. Maurer rejects the terms "proto-German" (Urdeutsch) and Anglo-Frisian as referring to historical linguistic units, and considers the German language the result of an amalgamation process of various "West Germanic" variants that took place in the course of the Middle Ages.

Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand, and by the second Germanic sound shift on the continent on the other.

The linguistic contact of the Viking settlers of the Danelaw with the Anglo-Saxons left traces in the English language, and is suspected to have facilitated the collapse of the Old English inflexional system that marked the onset of the Middle English period 12th century.

The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages. By Early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South (the Walliser dialect being the southernmost surviving German dialect) to Northern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are considered German, they are not mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, while the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift.

Modern variants

Of modern German varieties the north German Low Saxon is the one that most resembles modern English. The district of 'Angeln' (or Anglia), from which the name "English" derives, is in the extreme north of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. Saxony lies further to the south. The Anglo-Saxons were a combination of a number of peoples from northern Germany and the Jutland Peninsula.

Sound Shifts

High German subdivides into Upper German (green) and Central German (blue), and is distinguished from Low German (yellow). The main isoglosses, the Benrath and Speyer lines, are marked in black.

First Sound Shift

Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) sometime in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration). As it is presently formulated, Grimm's Law consists of three parts, which must be thought of as three consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift:

Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.
Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless.
Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops lose their aspiration and change into plain voiced stops.
The voiced aspirated stops may have first become voiced fricatives before hardening to the voiced unaspirated stops "b", "d", and "g" under certain conditions, however some linguists dispute this. See Proto-Germanic phonology.

Grimm's law was the first non-trivial systematic sound change to be discovered in linguistics; its formulation was a turning point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of a rigorous methodology to historical linguistic research. The "law" was discovered by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1806 and Rasmus Christian Rask in 1818, and later elaborated (i.e. extended to include standard German) in 1822 by Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm, in his book Deutsche Grammatik. Some scholars use the term Rask's-Grimm's rule.

Second Shift

In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or Second Germanic consonant shift was a phonological development (sound change) which took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, and was almost complete before the earliest written records in the High German language were made in the 9th century. The resulting language, Old High German, can neatly be contrasted with the other continental West Germanic languages, which mostly did not experience the shift, and with Old English, which was completely unaffected.

General description

The High German consonant shift altered a number of consonants in the Southern German dialects, and thus also in modern Standard German, and so explains why many German words have different consonants from the obviously related words in English. Briefly, there are four thrusts which may be thought of as four successive phases:

Germanic voiceless stops became fricatives in certain phonetic environments (English ship maps to German Schiff);
The same sounds became affricates in other positions (apple : Apfel);
Voiced stops became voiceless (door : Tür); and
/θ/ became /d/ (this : dies).
This phenomenon is known as the "High German" consonant shift because it affects the High German dialects (i.e. those of the mountainous south), principally the Upper German dialects, though in part it also affects the Central German dialects. However the fourth phase also included Low German and Dutch. It is also known as the "second Germanic" consonant shift to distinguish it from the "(first) Germanic consonant shift" as defined by Grimm's law and the refinement of this known as Verner's law.

The High German consonant shift did not occur in a single movement, but rather, as a series of waves over several centuries. The geographical extent of these waves varies. They all appear in the southernmost dialects, and spread northwards to differing degrees, giving the impression of a series of pulses of varying force emanating from what is now Austria and Switzerland. While some are found only in the southern parts of Alemannic (which includes Swiss German) or Bavarian (which includes Austrian), most are found throughout the Upper German area, and some spread on into the Central German dialects. Indeed, Central German is often defined as the area between the Appel/Apfel and the Dorp/Dorf boundaries. The shift þ→d was more successful; it spread all the way to the North Sea and affected Dutch as well as German. Most, but not all of these changes have become part of modern Standard German.

Note that the geographical boundary between two varieties of a word is called an isogloss.

Chronology

Since, apart from þ→d, the High German consonant shift took place before the beginning of writing of Old High German in the 9th century, the dating of the various phases is an uncertain business. The estimates quoted here are mostly taken from the dtv-Atlas zur deutschen Sprache (p.63). Different estimates appear elsewhere, for example Waterman, who asserts that the first three phases occurred fairly close together and were complete in Alemannic territory by 600, taking another two or three centuries to spread north.

Sometimes historical constellations help us; for example, the fact that Attila is called Etzel in German proves that the second phase must have been productive after the Hunnish invasion of the 5th century. The fact that many Latin loan-words are shifted in German (e.g. Latin strata→German Straße), while others are not (e.g. Latin poena→German Pein) allows us to date the sound changes before or after the likely period of borrowing. However the most useful source of chronological data is German words cited in Latin texts of the late classical and early mediaeval period.

Precise dating would in any case be difficult since each shift may have begun with one word or a group of words in the speech of one locality, and gradually extended by lexical diffusion to all words with the same phonological pattern, and then over a longer period of time spread to wider geographical areas.

However, relative chronology for phases 2, 3 and 4 can easily be established by the observation that t→tz must precede d→t, which in turn must precede þ→d; otherwise words with an original þ could have undergone all three shifts and ended up as tz. The phenomenon that an early phase of a sound shift leaves a gap (in this case voiceless stops) which a later phase then fills by means of a chain shift is familiar enough; Grimm's law proceeds in a similar sequence.

Alternative chronologies have been proposed. According to a not widely accepted theory by the German linguist Theo Vennemann, the consonant shift occurred much earlier and was already completed in the early 1st century BC. Based on that, he subdivides the Germanic languages into High Germanic and Low Germanic.

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