Ingvaeonic, also known as
North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the
West Germanic languages that comprises
Old Frisian,
Old English and
Old Saxon.
[1] Ingvaeonic is named after the
Ingaevones, a West Germanic cultural group or proto-tribe along the
North Sea coast. 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.
[2]. The grouping was proposed by German linguist
Friedrich Maurer as an alternative to the strict
tree diagrams which had become popular following the work of 19th century linguist
August Schleicher and which assumed the existence of a special
Anglo-Frisian group.
Linguistic evidence for Ingvaeonic are common innovations observed in Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon such as the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, the loss of the Germanic reflexive pronoun, the monophthongization of Germanic *ai to e/a, and deflexion such as the reduction of the three Germanic verbal plural forms into one form.
