In the beginning, Faroese language spoken in the Faroe Islands was Old West Norse, which Norwegian settlers had brought with them during the time of the landnam that began in AD 825. However, many of the settlers weren't really Norwegians, but descendents of Norwegian settlers in the Irish Sea. In addition, native Norwegian settlers often married women from Norse Ireland, the Orkneys, or Shetlands before settling in the Faroe Islands and Iceland. As a result, Celtic languages influenced both Faroese and Icelandic. Between the 9th and the 15th centuries, a distinct Faroese language evolved, although it was still intelligible with the languages within the realm of the Norwegian Viking Empire spanning from Norway Greenland and parts of North America.
Norn is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. Together with Faroese, Icelandic and Norwegian it belongs to the West Scandinavian group, separating it from the East Scandinavian group consisting of Swedish and Danish. Spoken Faroese is perhaps best understood by the speakers of nynorsk dialects in Western Norway (where most of the viking settlers seem to have come from). Icelandic native speakers would not understand spoken Faroese without some denotation by modern historiography, and Danish speakers have almost no chance of understanding it without extensive studies. Norn shared many traits with the dialects of south-west Norway. The division North Germanic languages into an Insular Scandinavian and Mainland Scandinavian languages, grouping Norwegian with Danish and Swedish based on mutual intelligibility and the fact that Norwegian has been heavily influenced in particular by Danish during the last millennium and has diverged from Faroese and Icelandic. Norn is generally considered to have been fairly similar to Faroese, sharing many phonological and grammatical traits with this language. Sounds
In the course of the High German consonant shift (3rd to 9th centuries AD), in the first three phases of which the Low German dialects did not participate, the West Germanic languages were separated along this line. The group of languages south of the line developed into High German – while the other West Germanic languages (English, Dutch, Frisian, and Low German) developed separately.
The Norn language for the language once spoken in Scotland during the age of use of "classical" Ogham in stone seems to have flowered in the 5th–6th centuries around the Irish Sea. In Scotland, a number of inscriptions using the Ogham writing system are known, but their language, unknown during the transition to Old Irish, the language of the earliest sources in the Latin alphabet, takes place in about the 6th century. In Ireland and in Wales, the language of the inscriptions this period is termed Primitive Irish. Another possiblility would be 4th century Irish colonies in Wales who came into contact with the Latin alphabet and the Ogham alphabet was modelled on another script, and some even consider it a mere cipher of its template script. Runic origin would elegantly explain the presence of "H" and "Z" letters unused in Irish, as well as the presence of vocalic and consonantal variants "U" vs. "W" unknown to Latin or Greek writing. The Latin alphabet is the main contender mainly because its influence at the required period (4th century) is most easily established, viz., via Britannia, while the runes in the 4th century were not very widespread even in continental Europe.
According to the 11th c. Lebor Gabála Érenn, the 14th c. Auraicept na n-Éces, and other Medieval Irish folklore, Ogham was first invented soon after the fall of the Tower of Babel, along with the Gaelic language, by the legendary Scythian king, Fenius Farsa. According to the Auraicept, Fenius journeyed from Scythia together with Goídel mac Ethéoir, Íar mac Nema and a retinue of 72 scholars. They came to the plain of Shinar to study the confused languages at Nimrod's tower (the Tower of Babel). The first message written in Ogam were seven b's on a birch. Monumental Ogham inscriptions are found in Ireland, Wales, and the Isle of Man, with a few additional specimens found in England, Scotland and Shetland.
In German linguistics, the Benrath line (German: Benrather Linie) is an isogloss, or bundle of isoglosses, marking the border between the Northern Low Germanic dialects and the High Germanic dialects in the south. The Line runs from Benrath (part of Düsseldorf) to East Germany in the area of Berlin and Magdeburg. The Benrath line is also known as the "Maken-machen line", as it marks the boundary between maken in the Low German dialects and machen in the High German ones (both mean "to make").
Norn is an extinct North Germanic language that was spoken on the Shetland Islands and Orkney Islands, off the coast of Scotland. After the islands were ceded to the Kingdom of Scotland in the 15th century, its use was discouraged by the Scottish government and the Church of Scotland (the national church), and was gradually replaced by Lowland Scots over time. Dialects of Norse had also been spoken on mainland Scotland for example, in Caithness but here they became extinct many centuries before Norn died on Orkney and Shetland. Until the 15th century, Faroese had a similar orthography to Icelandic and Norwegian, but after the Reformation in 1538, the ruling Danes outlawed its use in schools, churches and official documents. The islanders continued to use the language in ballads, folktales, and everyday life. This maintained a rich spoken tradition, but for 300 years the language was not written down.
The High German consonant shift or Second Germanic consonant shift was a phonological development (sound change) which took place in the southern dialects of German in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, and was almost complete before the earliest written records in the German language were made in the 9th century. The resulting language was Old High German, which can neatly be contrasted with the Northern German Old Saxon, which mostly did not experience the shift, and with Old English, which was completely unaffected.
The High German consonant shift altered a number of consonants in the Southern German dialects, and thus also in modern Standard German, and so explains why many German words have different consonants from the obviously related words in English. This phenomenon is known as the "High German" consonant shift because it affects the High German dialects (i.e. those of the mountainous south), principally the Upper German dialects, though in part it also affects the Central German dialects. However the fourth phase also included Low German and Dutch. It is also known as the "second Germanic" consonant shift to distinguish it from the "(first) Germanic consonant shift" as defined by Grimm's law and the refinement of this known as Verner's law.
Grimm's law (also known as the [First] Germanic Sound Shift) was the first non-trivial systematic sound change ever to be discovered; its formulation was a turning point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of rigorous methodology in historical linguistic research. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives (Consonant) and the stop consonants of certain other Indo-European languages. The Germanic "sound laws", combined with regular changes reconstructed for other Indo-European languages, allow one to define the expected sound correspondences between different branches of the family. Grimm also discovered another ("Second") consonant shift, the High German consonant shift, which accounts for the consonant system of the High Germanic languages. (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration).
Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives. Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless. Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops lose their aspiration and change into plain voiced stops. The High German consonant shift did not occur in a single movement, but rather, as a series of waves over several centuries. The geographical extent of these waves varies. They all appear in the southernmost dialects, and spread northwards to differing degrees, giving the impression of a series of pulses of varying force emanating from what is now Austria and Switzerland. While some are found only in the southern parts of Alemannic (which includes Swiss German) or Bavarian (which includes Austrian), most are found throughout the Upper German area, and some spread on into the Central German dialects. The geographical boundary between two varieties of a word is called an isogloss.
The Middle Low German (technically Middle Saxon) language is an ancestor of the modern Low German. It was spoken from about 1100 to 1500, descending from Old Saxon. It split off into West Low German and East Low German. Middle Low German was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, spoken all around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Based on the language of Lübeck, a standardized written language was developing, though it was never codified. The neighbour languages within the dialect continuum of the Low German languages were Middle Dutch in the West and Middle High German (1050-1350 AD) in the South, later substituted by Early Modern High German. Traces of the importance of Middle Low German can be seen by the many loans found in the Scandinavian languages and in the Baltic languages, but also in standard German or in English.
Middle High German (Iro-Scottish) is preceded by Old High German and followed by Early New High German. The term covers a longer period, going up to 1500 and the two main dialect areas are Upper German (Alemannic, Bavarian, East Franconian, South Franconian) and Central German (Franconian, Rhine Franconian, Middle Franconian, East Central German, Thuringian, Upper Saxon, Silesian, High Prussian. The Hohenstaufen court gave rise in the late 12th century to a supra-regional literary language based on Swabian.
An important development in this period was the eastward expansion of German settlement beyond the Elbe-Saale line which marked the limit of Old High German. This process started in the 11th century, and all the East Central German dialects are a result of this expansion. Judeo-German is the precursor of the Yiddish language which is attested in the 13th-14th centuries as a variety of Middle High German written in Hebrew characters. Culturally, the two periods are distinguished by the transition from a predominantly clerical written culture to one centred on the courts of the great nobles. The imperial court in Vienna and the rise of the Swabian Hohenstaufen and then the Habsburg dynasties make South Germany the dominant region in both political and cultural terms. The transition to Early New High German is marked by the loss of unstressed vowels in many circumstances.
By the Lombardic alphabet, commonly transcribed and consisting of graphemes, Longbardic fragments are preserved in runic inscriptions, in latinized forms, and in transcriptions influenced by Old High German orthography. Formerly, Lombardic was classified as Ingaevonian (North Sea Germanic), but this classification is considered obsolete. Lombardic or Langobardic is the extinct language of the Lombards (Langobardi), the Germanic speaking settlers in Italy in the 6th century. The language declined from the 7th century, but may have been in scattered use until as late as ca. AD 1000. The language is only preserved fragmentarily; in the absence of Lombardic texts, it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the language's morphology and syntax.