Anglo-Frisian languages

The proposed Anglo-Frisian family tree is:

• Anglo-Frisian
  • Anglic
    • English
      • Northumbrian and Cumbrian (see the article about the Humber-Lune Line)
    • Scots
      • Insular Scots
      • Northern Scots
      • Central Scots
      • Southern Scots
      • Doric Scots
      • Ulster Scots
    • Irish Anglo-Norman[3][4][5]
      • Yola
      • Fingalian (extinct)
  • Frisian
    • West Frisian
      • Hindeloopen Frisian
      • Schiermonnikoog Frisian
      • Westlauwers–Terschellings
        • Terschelling Frisian
        • Mainland West Frisian
    • East Frisian
      • Saterland Frisian (last remaining dialect of East Frisian)
    • North Frisian

The following is a summary of the major sound changes affecting vowels in chronological order.[15] 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
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

Ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that encompasses Old Frisian, Old English,[note 4] and Old Saxon.[17]

However, since Anglo-Frisian features occur in Low German and especially in its older language stages, there is a tendency to prefere the ingveonic classification instead of the anglo-frisian one, which also takes Low German into account. Because Old Saxon came under strong Old High German and Old Low Franconian influence early on and therefore lost many Ingveonic features that were to be found much more extensively in earlier language states.[18]

It 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.[19]

The 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.[20]

• 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.