Revising the History of Germanic Languages: The Concept of <i>Germance</i>

Abstract

This paper puts forward a new division of the history of Germanic languages, taking into account the existence of three different historical periods (prehistoric, proto-historic, and literary) in the development from Common Germanic or Proto-Germanic to modern Germanic languages, analogously to the development of Romance or Romanic languages from Vulgar Latin (also called Proto-Romanic or Proto-Romance), in which three stages can be retraced: Vulgar Latin (prehistoric), Romance (proto-historic) and literary (historical). So far, only two stages have been considered in the linguistic history of Germanic languages, namely, the Common Germanic (not documented) and the literary Germanic languages (documented since the Middle Ages). Nevertheless, the history of both families of languages is similar in most aspects, so that the three aforementioned periods can be clearly recognized in both: a period of considerable linguistic unity, although poorly or not at all documented; a period of dissolution of this unity and fragmentation into several dialects not mutually intercomprehensible; and a period of full and intense literary production and official recognition of some of these dialects, now raised to the condition of culture languages. Due to this new historiographical division, the denomination Germance is proposed for the second of the three evolutionary stages of Germanic.