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| The Germani as defined by Language | <table of contents> <previous page> <next page> page 1 of 4 |
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| Just as the most meaningful way to define the Germans today would be to look to the shared language, the best way to define the Germani is by way of their common language. Now, we know that almost all European languages are related. The exceptions are Basque to the west, Finnish, Lapp, and Estonian to the north, and Hungarian to the east of Germany. All other languages, including the Iranian and Indian languages, can be traced back to a common ancestor, now called Indo-Germanic or Indo-European. Its speakers lived between the Himalayas and the Atlantic around two millennia BCE, at the latest. The prehistoric cultures characterized by their banded ceramics and battle axes probably spoke Indo-European as a living language. But questions about their original geographical location are largely unanswered at this time. The Germanic language developed into a sub-group of the Indo-European language sometime during the millennium just before the Christian Era. A more exact date cannot be given since there is no written evidence from that time. What we do know is that the process took more than a millennium to play out. It stretches from that “Proto-German” language to a “Late-common-German” at the time of the great migrations. And finally, the different tribal dialects gave rise to what we refer to today as Germanic languages: German, Dutch (including Flemish in Belgium), Frisian, English, and the Scandinavian languages Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and the language of the Faroe Islands. |
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