4 - The Germanic languages

Summary

The branch of Indo-European that English belongs to is called Germanic, and includes German, Dutch, Frisian, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. All these languages are descended from one parent language, a dialect of Indo-European, which we can call Proto-Germanic (PG). Round about the beginning of the Christian era, the speakers of Proto-Germanic still formed a relatively homogeneous cultural and linguistic group, living in the north of Europe. We have no records of the language in this period, but we know something about the people who spoke it, because they are described by Roman authors, who called them the Germani, which we for convenience can translate as ‘Germans’. One of the best-known of these descriptions is that written by Tacitus in AD 98, called Germania.

Early Germanic society

Tacitus describes the Germans as a tribal society living in scattered settlements in the woody and marshy country of North west Europe. He says that they hate cities and keep their houses far apart, living in wooden buildings, or sometimes, in winter, in pits dug in the ground and covered over with rubbish. They keep flocks, and grow grain crops, but their agriculture is not very advanced, and they do not practise horticulture. Because of the large amount of open ground, they change their ploughlands yearly, allotting areas to whole villages, and distributing land to cultivators in order of rank. The family plays a large part in their social organization, and the more relatives a man has the greater is his influence in his old age.