Anglo-Frisian languages

The Anglo-Frisian languages are a group of related languages that include the Anglic languages such as English and Scots, as well as the Frisian languages like West Frisian, North Frisian, and East Frisian. Some people think these languages share a special connection, but many modern experts believe they are part of a bigger group called the Ingvaeonic languages. These languages spread along the North Sea and became different over time, especially during a big movement of people called the Migration Period in the 5th century.

Even though there is debate about how these languages are related, they do share some special sound changes that make them unique. For example, words like "cheese" and "church" sound different in English and Frisian compared to other languages such as Dutch or German. These differences help experts understand how the languages changed over time.

Geography played a big role in shaping these languages. The people who lived in Great Britain were far away from the rest of Europe, so their language, English, was influenced more by Old Norse and later the Norman language. The Frisian languages, however, developed closer to the southern Germanic areas, which shaped their sound and words in different ways.

Classification

The Anglo-Frisian family tree is a way to group certain languages together. It includes two main groups: the Anglic languages and the Frisian languages.

The Anglic languages include English and Scots, along with some older, no-longer-spoken languages like Fingallian and Yola from Ireland.

The Frisian languages are spoken by around 500,000 people near the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. West Frisian is the most spoken, with about 875,840 speakers, and is an official language in the Dutch province of Friesland. North Frisian has around 8,000 speakers, mainly on islands and parts of mainland Germany. East Frisian has only about 2,000 speakers today, mostly in a place called Saterland in Germany.

Anglo-Frisian developments

This section talks about important sound changes in the Anglo-Frisian languages, which include English and Frisian. These changes happened to vowels—the parts of words you say when you sing—and happened in a certain order. Some experts think these changes didn’t happen the same way for all these languages.

Some of the big changes include:

1. Changes to certain vowel sounds before special letters.
2. Dropping a letter that changed the sound of the vowel before it.
3. Using one form for certain verb endings.
4. Shifting vowel sounds forward in the mouth.
5. Changing certain consonant sounds before front vowels.
6. Shifting some vowel sounds back to their original form.
7. Further shifting of vowel sounds in some areas.
8. More changes to vowels based on nearby letters.
9. Special changes in one dialect of Old English.
10. Changes caused by nearby vowels, followed by other sound shifts.
11. Final sound changes that made some sounds distinct.
12. Smoothing out some sounds and shifting others backward.

For more details, see Phonological history of Old English.

Comparisons

Here are the words for the numbers one to 12 in several Anglo-Frisian languages, along with some other languages like Dutch, Afrikaans, West-Flemish, and German for comparison:

Ae , is a special form used before nouns.

Alternative grouping

Main article: North Sea Germanic

North Sea Germanic, also called Ingvaeonic, is a way to group some old West Germanic languages. It includes Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon. This grouping is seen as an alternative to the Anglo-Frisian idea, or something that came before it.

Some experts think North Sea Germanic is a better way to look at these languages than splitting them into Anglo-Frisian and Low German. This is because Old Saxon, an older form of Low German, lost some shared features with Old English and Old Frisian early on due to influence from other languages.

North Sea Germanic isn’t thought to be one single old language. Instead, it’s a group of related dialects that changed in similar ways at the same time. The loss of two older languages, Old Anglian and Old Jutish, might have made it harder for experts to see the full picture. These languages were spoken in areas that are now part of southern Schleswig and Jutland.

The idea of North Sea Germanic was first suggested in a book from 1942 called Nordgermanen und Alemannen by a German expert named Friedrich Maurer. He proposed this as an alternative to older ways of organizing these languages that were based on strict family tree models created by another expert, August Schleicher.