Proto-Germanic

Proto-Germanic, the proto-language believed by scholars to be the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, includes among its descendants Dutch, Yiddish, German, English, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Old Norse, Swedish, Icelandic and Danish. There are no extent documents in Proto-Germanic, which was unwritten, and virtually all our knowledge of this extinct language has been obtained by application of the comparative method.

Proto-Germanic is itself descended from Proto-Indo-European, which is also the distant ancestor of a great many other languages in Europe and Asia. For the changes undergone by Proto-Germanic during its descent from Proto-Indo-European, see Germanic languages.

Proto-Indo-European speakers probably arrived to the plains of southern Sweden, Denmark and north-western Germany, regarded to be the original dwelling-place of the Germanic peoples, during the early Bronze Age (ca. 2000 BCE). As there is no archaeological evidence for this immigration, an alternative theory claims that Proto-Germanic may have arisen peacefully as a Creole language from contacts with a mysterious and undefined prehistoric Indo-European trade empire/civilisation. However, considering the inflected character and the homogeneous forms of the Germanic languages, the creation of such a creole would have been a resounding and unique feat indeed. More likely is that proto-Germanic arose as a hybrid of two Indo-European dialects, one each of Centum and Satem types though they would have been mutually intelligible at the time of hybridization. This hypothesis helps explain the difficulty of placing Germanic in the Indo-European tree.

The reconstructed Proto-Germanic vocabulary includes a number of fundamental words (referring to animals and nature) which are clearly non-Indo-European in origin, suggesting a vocabulary influence from the earlier inhabitants of northern Europe. The mechanism of this influence is unknown; it may have been simple borrowing, or perhaps retention of old words by people who adopted Proto-Germanic as their new language. For examples, see Non-Indo-European roots of Germanic.