Germanic Languages - Characteristics

Characteristics

Germanic languages possess a number of defining features compared with other Indo-European languages, such as the following:

1. Large numbers of vowels. For example, the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian German has 13 distinct long vowels. Standard Swedish has 9 long vowels and 8 short vowels, which are distinguished by both length and quality, making for at least 16 vowel qualities.
2. A change known as Germanic umlaut, which modified vowel qualities when a high vocalic segment (/i/, /iː/ or /j/) followed in the next syllable. This is largely responsible for the large vowel systems.
3. The reduction of the various tense and aspect combinations of the Indo-European verbal system into only two: the present tense and the past tense (also called the preterite).
4. A large class of verbs that use a dental suffix (/d/ or /t/) instead of vowel alternation (Indo-European ablaut) to indicate past tense. These are called the Germanic weak verbs; the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the Germanic strong verbs.
5. The use of so-called strong and weak adjectives: different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives depending on the definiteness of the noun phrase. (A similar development happened in the Balto-Slavic languages. This has been lost in modern English, but was present in Old English, and is still present in modern German.)
6. Grimm's Law, which shifted the values of all the Indo-European stop consonants. (A similar shift occurred later in the history of German, known as the High German consonant shift.)
7. Some words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families but with variants that appear in almost all Germanic languages.
8. The sound change known as Verner's Law, which left a trace of Indo-European accent variations in voicing variations in fricatives.
9. The shifting of word stress onto word stems and later onto the first syllable of the word, along with significant phonological reduction of all other syllables. (A similar change occurred in the history of the Italic languages and the Celtic languages. English no longer has initial stress due to the borrowing of numerous foreign words, especially from Latin and French.)

Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward analyticity. Some, such as Icelandic, and to a lesser extent, German, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language. Others, such as English, Swedish, and Afrikaans, have moved toward a largely analytic type.

Another characteristic of Germanic languages is verb second (V2) word order, which is uncommon cross-linguistically. This feature was not inherited from Proto-Germanic, but may have already been present in latent form, and may be related to Wackernagel's Law, an Indo-European law dictating that sentence clitics must be placed second. It is now shared by all modern Germanic languages except modern English which has more or less replaced the earlier V2 structure with fixed Subject–verb–object word order.