3. The main historical event of Roman-German languages development in new era The Germanic languages

3. The main historical event of Roman-German languages development in new era

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 West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers; Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35-7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it (at least 2.2 million in Germany (2016) and 2.15 million in the Netherlands (2003)); Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe, now with approximately 1.5 million native speakers; Scots, with 1.5 million native speakers; Limburgish varieties with roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border; and the Frisian languages with over 0.5 million native speakers in the Netherlands and Germany.
The largest North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, which are in part mutually intelligible and have a combined total of about 20 million native speakers in the Nordic countries and an additional five million second language speakers; since the Middle Ages these languages have however been strongly influenced by the West Germanic language Middle Low German, and Low German words account for about 30–60% of their vocabularies according to various estimates. Other extant North Germanic languages are Faroese, Icelandic, and Elfdalian, which are more conservative languages with no significant Low German influence, more complex grammar and limited mutual intelligibility with the others today.
The Germanic Sound Shift
Stedje (1989) points out that Proto-Germanic (PG) probably began to develop as far back as about 2000b.c., as Indo-Europeans began to settle western areas of the Baltic Sea (see Appendix A), and ended about 500b.c., when the differences had become evident enough to discriminate PG from other languages. One area of difference between Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and PG was the Great Germanic Sound Shift.
New High German (1600 to 1800) (The French Influence)
Despite the progress made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to develop and maintain a Nationalsprache (national language), French still continued to be considerable influence on the German language because it was the language of the German courts. During the reign of France’s "sun king", Louis XIV (1643-1715), it seemed that French was very much in fashion with the upper and middle classes
Today there continue to be many variations and dialects of the German language. During the past 50 years, great changes have taken place in the fundamental and theoretical study of the German language. Some may believe that there is nothing more to do in the study of the German language. However, there is great value in continuing to study the history of the language to better understand how changes occurred and how they might occur in the future. Even though we live in a small world, where printed language may tend to "stabilize" language according to some, I cannot think of a day when language will cease to evolve.