Anglo-Frisian languages

The proposed Anglo-Frisian family tree is:

Anglic,^[7][8] Insular Germanic, or English languages^[9][10] encompass Old English and all the linguistic varieties descended from it. These include Middle English, Early Modern English, and Late Modern English; Early Scots, Middle Scots, and Modern Scots; and the extinct Fingallian and Yola dialects in Ireland.

English-based creole languages are not generally included, as mainly only their lexicon and not necessarily their grammar, phonology, etc. comes from Early Modern English and Late Modern English.

The Frisian languages are a group of languages spoken by about 500,000 Frisian people on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. West Frisian, by far the most spoken of the three main branches with 875,840 total speakers,^[11] constitutes an official language in the Dutch province of Friesland. North Frisian is spoken on some North Frisian Islands and parts of mainland North Frisia in the northernmost German district of Nordfriesland, and also in Heligoland in the German Bight, both part of Schleswig-Holstein state (Heligoland is part of its mainland district of Pinneberg). North Frisian has approximately 8,000 speakers.^[12] The East Frisian language is spoken by only about 2,000 people;^[13] speakers are located in Saterland in Germany.
There are no known East Frisian dialects, but there are three dialects of West Frisian and ten of North Frisian.

• West Frisian dialects:^[11]
  • Clay Frisian (Klaaifrysk)
  • South or Southwest Frisian (Súdhoeksk)
  • Wood Frisian (Wâldfrysk)
• North Frisian dialects:^[12]
  • Insular dialects
    • Sylt Frisian (Söl'ring)
    • Föhr-Amrum Frisian (Fering, Öömrang)
    • Heligolandic Frisian (Halunder)
  • Mainland dialects
    • Wiedingharde Frisian (Wiringhiirder)
    • Bökingharde Frisian (Mooringer)
    • Karrharde Frisian (Karrharder)
    • Goesharde Frisian (Gooshiirder)
      • Northern Goesharde Frisian (incl. Hooringer Fräisch & Hoolmer Freesch)
      • Central Goesharde Frisian
      • Southern Goesharde Frisian (extinct since early 1980s)
    • Halligen Frisian (Halifreesk)

The following is a summary of the major sound changes affecting vowels in chronological order.^[14] For additional detail, see Phonological history of Old English. That these were simultaneous and in that order for all Anglo-Frisian languages is considered disproved by some scholars.^[1]

1. Backing and nasalization of West Germanic a and ā before a nasal consonant
2. Loss of n before a spirant, resulting in lengthening and nasalization of preceding vowel
3. Single form for present and preterite plurals
4. A-fronting: West Germanic a, ā > æ, ǣ, even in the diphthongs ai and au (see Anglo-Frisian brightening)
5. palatalization of Proto-Germanic *k and *g before front vowels (but not phonemicization of palatals)
6. A-restoration: æ, ǣ > a, ā under the influence of neighboring consonants^{[clarification needed]}
7. Second fronting: OE dialects (except West Saxon) and Frisian ǣ > ē
8. A-restoration: a restored before a back vowel in the following syllable (later in the Southumbrian dialects); Frisian æu > au > Old Frisian ā/a
9. OE breaking; in West Saxon palatal diphthongization follows
10. i-mutation followed by syncope; Old Frisian breaking follows
11. Phonemicization of palatals and assibilation, followed by second fronting in parts of West Mercia
12. Smoothing and back mutation

These are the words for the numbers one to 12 in the Anglo-Frisian languages, with Dutch, West-Flemish and German included for comparison:

* Ae [eː], [jeː] is an adjectival form used before nouns.^[15]

North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic, is a proposed grouping of the West Germanic languages that encompasses Old Frisian, Old English,^{[note 4]} and Old Saxon.^[16] The North Sea Germanic grouping may be regarded as an alternative to Anglo-Frisian, or as ancestral to it.

Since Anglo-Frisian features occur in Low German – especially in its older stages such as Old Saxon – some scholars regard the North Sea Germanic classification as more meaningful than a sharp division into Anglo-Frisian and Low German. In other words, because Old Saxon came under strong Old High German and Old Low Franconian influence at an early stage, it lost some North Sea Germanic features,^[17] that it had previously shared with Old English and Old Frisian.

North Sea Germanic is not thought of as a monolithic proto-language, but rather as a group of closely related dialects that underwent several areal changes in relative unison.^[18]

The extinction of two little-attested and presumably North Sea Germanic languages, Old Old Anglian and Old Jutish, in their homelands (modern southern Schleswig and Jutland respectively), mat have led to a form of "survivorship bias" in classification. Since Old Anglian and Jutish were, like Old Saxon, direct ancestors of Old English, it might follow that Old Saxon, Old Anglian and/or Jutish were more closely related to English than any of them was to Frisian (or vice versa).

North Sea Germanic, as a hypothetical grouping, was first proposed in Nordgermanen und Alemannen (1942) by the German linguist and philologist Friedrich Maurer (1898–1984), as an alternative to the strict tree diagrams that had become popular following the work of the 19th-century linguist August Schleicher and which assumed the existence of an Anglo-Frisian group.^[19]

• High German languages
• Low Franconian languages

• Maurer, Friedrich (1942). Nordgermanen und Alemannen: Studien zur Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde (in German). Strasbourg: Hünenburg.
• Euler, Wolfram (2013). Das Westgermanische [West Germanic: from its Emergence in the 3rd up until its Dissolution in the 7th Century CE: Analyses and Reconstruction] (in German). London/Berlin: Verlag Inspiration Un Ltd. p. 244. ISBN 978-3-9812110-7-8.
• Ringe, Don; Taylor, Ann (2014). The Development of Old English - A Linguistic History of English. Vol. 2. Oxford: University Press. ISBN 978-0199207848.