The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia.
The Romance languages, less commonly referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the 3rd and 8th centuries. They are a subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language family. The six most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan. Among all the Romance languages, including national and regional languages, Sardinian, Italian and Spanish are together the least differentiated from Latin, and Occitan is closer to Latin than French. The most divergent to Latin is French, which was heavily influenced by Germanic languages. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin.
The Germanic umlaut is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel (fronting) or a front vowel becomes closer to (raising) when the following syllable contains, , or.
In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain - typically a phonological word - have to be members of the same natural class. Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning that the affected vowels do not need to be immediately adjacent, and there can be intervening segments between the affected vowels. Generally one vowel will trigger a shift in other vowels, either progressively or regressively, within the domain, such that the affected vowels match the relevant feature of the trigger vowel. Common phonological features that define the natural classes of vowels involved in vowel harmony include vowel backness, vowel height, nasalization, roundedness, and advanced and retracted tongue root.
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut is a system of apophony in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects whose ancestor was Old Dutch. It was spoken and written between 1150 and 1500. Until the advent of Modern Dutch after 1500 or c. 1550, there was no overarching standard language, but all dialects were mutually intelligible. During that period, a rich Medieval Dutch literature developed, which had not yet existed during Old Dutch. The various literary works of the time are often very readable for speakers of Modern Dutch since Dutch is a rather conservative language.
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word or between words.
I-mutation is a type of sound change in which a back vowel is fronted or a front vowel is raised if the following syllable contains, or. It is a category of regressive metaphony, or vowel harmony.
A-mutation is a metaphonic process supposed to have taken place in late Proto-Germanic.
The Warlpiri language is spoken by about 3,000 of the Warlpiri people in Australia's Northern Territory. It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Pama–Nyungan family and is one of the largest Aboriginal languages in Australia in terms of number of speakers. One of the most well-known terms for The Dreaming, Jukurrpa, derives from Warlpiri.
In historical linguistics, vowel breaking, vowel fracture, or diphthongization is the sound change of a monophthong into a diphthong or triphthong.
In linguistics, apophony is any sound change within a word that indicates grammatical information.
The diaeresis and the umlaut are two different diacritical marks that look alike. They both consist of two dots ¨ placed over a letter, usually a vowel; when that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï. In computer systems, both forms have the same code point. Their appearance in print or on screen may vary between typefaces but rarely within the same typeface.
French is a Romance language that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.
Affection, in the linguistics of the Celtic languages, is the change in the quality of a vowel under the influence of the vowel of the following final syllable.
In linguistics, umlaut is a sound change in which a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined in connection with the study of Germanic languages, as it had occurred prominently in the history of many of them. While a common English plural is umlauts, the German plural is Umlaute.
In the Romance languages, metaphony was an early vowel mutation process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees, raising certain stressed vowels in words with a final or or a directly following. This is conceptually similar to the umlaut process so characteristic of the Germanic languages. Metaphony is most extensive in the Italo-Romance languages, and applies to nearly all languages of Italy. However, it is absent from Tuscan, and hence from Standard Italian.
The Proto-Slavic language, the hypothetical ancestor of the modern-day Slavic languages, developed from the ancestral Proto-Balto-Slavic language, which is the parent language of the Balto-Slavic languages. The first 2,000 years or so consist of the pre-Slavic era, a long period during which none of the later dialectal differences between Slavic languages had yet happened. The last stage in which the language remained without internal differences that later characterize different Slavic languages can be dated around AD 500 and is sometimes termed Proto-Slavic proper or Early Common Slavic. Following this is the Common Slavic period, during which the first dialectal differences appeared but the entire Slavic-speaking area continued to function as a single language, with sound changes tending to spread throughout the entire area. By around 1000, the area had broken up into separate East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic languages, and in the following centuries it broke up further into the various modern Slavic languages of which the following are extant: Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn and Ukrainian in the East; Czech, Slovak, Polish, Kashubian and the Sorbian languages in the West, and Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian in the South.
The phonological system of the Old English language underwent many changes during the period of its existence. These included a number of vowel shifts, and the palatalisation of velar consonants in many positions.
