Facts About Western Germanic Languages

Can you list down all the ways in which you are different from your siblings? You most probably can, mainly because you get compared to them a lot and you ended up compiling a list of differences. But the reason people compare you with them is because they are your siblings and even if you don’t want to, you do share some features with them. Growing up under the same roof means you will end up absorbing some of their qualities as they will do with yours. And having the same genes would mean some similarities in physical features. It must be pretty difficult for twins to describe the differences among each other. But at the end of the day, humans are better at noticing differences than similarities.

Facts About Western Germanic Languages:

Here are a few very interesting facts about this branch of the Indo-European family:

1. Vowels:

All the West Germanic languages share a few features regarding their vowels. Although English only has five vowels, it compensates with vowel sounds. Most dialects of English have plenty of vowel sounds and the situation is no different among other tongues. German and Dutch, both of English’s sisters, have 14 vowels. All of these have different sounds depending on their placement in a word. This feature, which may sound so common to English speakers, is not in other languages like Greece where a vowel doesn’t change sounds.

2. Worldwide Influence:

English is considered the lingua franca of the world today, which means it is spoken almost everywhere on earth. Although English adopts a lot of languages’ world, it also influences its relatives and sisters. Due to being spoken in different parts of the world, the West Germanic languages have wide influence. They affect the culture of every country they go to and end up giving some loan words to the local languages.

3. Pidgins and Creoles:

Along with the more famous languages like English, German, and Dutch, plenty of creoles and dialects are also included in it. The dialects of different tongues are not usually listed in a group because they are not considered separate languages. Pidgins and creoles have more well-defined identities than dialects, which is why they become a part of groups.

4. Daughter Languages:

Colonization resulted in various tongues being adopted by different nations. European vernaculars ended up being spoken all over the world only because of colonization. But that’s not the only way colonization affected linguistic history. In some regions, the local population ended up creating their own version of a foreign language. Afrikaans is a good example of that. It is a daughter language of Dutch but its features make it different from the European version of Dutch. Afrikaans and Yiddish both are a part of the West Germanic group and shares plenty of features with their mother tongues.