The Indo-European speaking Stone Age tribes that migrated north and west from the source in Lithuania developed a language that we know today as Proto-Germanic (or more simply, just Germanic). In later times, even these tribes migrated away from each other and developed dialects that were probably mutually comprehensible, though different in many respects. The tribes that settled in the western part of the Germanic region were the Angles, the Saxons, the Frisians, and the Jutes. To their north other tribes settled what is now Scandinavia, and further east settled the Goths, the Burgundii (who later moved southwest into Gaul, giving their name to the region that has become famous for its wine), and the Vandals (famous for being the tribe that sacked Rome in 455 A.D.).
The Frisians occupied the coastal area along what is now the Netherlands and the near islands (now known as the Frisian Islands) in the North Sea. Bordering them to the east were the Saxons, occupying much of what is now lowland and coastal Germany. Further east and north, across the Elbe River, in the area of the Schleswig-Holstein peninsula, were the Angles. In the Jutland peninsula, in modern Denmark, lived the Jutes.
By the fifth century A.D., these warlike Germanic tribes, though illiterate and without the highly advanced civilization of the competing Roman Empire to their south, were among the most powerful and influential in all of Europe. After the Romans were forced to withdraw their troops from England to defend their homeland from Germanic invasions, the fierce Anglo-Saxons (the western Germanic tribes who spoke separate but mutually comprehensible dialects of West Germanic) were called by the Celts on the British Isles to help defend against the Scots and the Picts who were invading. The Anglo-Saxons arrived in 449 A.D., according to Bede, and proceeded to drive out the invading Scots and Picts and then to conquer the island for themselves.
Sometime around 2000 B.C., as Indo-European speaking tribes began to fan out over Europe, some tribes moved roughly north and west of the homeland, settling into what is now Denmark. Before 500 B.C. their language had become so differentiated from the parent IE that it was indeed a separate language and is called by scholars today "Proto-Germanic" or simply Germanic. The speakers of Germanic were not literate, so they left us no written records for study. Shortly before the time of Christ, roughly the first century B.C., Germanic speakers had spread over most of northern and eastern Europe, covering the area from the Netherlands to the Scandinavian peninsula.
By the time that the spread of Germanic was at its peak, the Germanic language was so far flung geographically that it was inevitable that dialects would have arisen and that these dialects would eventually become mutually incomprehensible and thus comprise separate languages. By the time of Christ, as the Roman empire with its IE-derived Latin language covered most of southern and central Europe, three major languages derived from the parent Germanic covered much of northern Europe: these have come to be called today "East Germanic," "North Germanic," and "West Germanic."
Differences from other IE languages
Proto-Germanic is distinguished from Indo-European and other languages descended from Indo-European by a number of changes, with the seven most important being:
- The vocabulary includes a significant number of words with no known Indo-European cognates.
- A simplification of the Indo-European verb system, reducing the number of tenses to two: present and preterit (or past).
- The development of a "dental preterit," i.e., the use of "d" or "t" sounds at the end of verbs to indicate past tense. Such verbs are called "weak verbs." Verbs indicating past tense by the more Indo-European method of ablaut (e.g., sing and sang) are called strong verbs.
- All adjectives were declined, and all had two types of declensions: weak and strong
- The stress in nearly all words shifted strongly to the first syllable, and became fixed there.
- Vowels changed sound in regular ways. For example, the IE sound "o" became "a" in Germanic and its descendants.
- IE stop consonants all shifted sounds. These shifts are known as the First Germanic Sound Shift, and are described in detail by Grimm's Law with modifications described by Verner's Law.
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