When someone asks “how old is English?” or “how old is German?”, the answer is surprisingly tricky. Languages don’t have birth certificates. They evolve gradually from older forms, and deciding when one language becomes a “different” language is more a matter of convention than hard science. But we can trace the Germanic language family back a remarkably long way.
Proto-Germanic: The Common Ancestor
All Germanic languages — English, German, Dutch, Frisian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and several others — descend from a single ancestor language called Proto-Germanic. Linguists estimate that Proto-Germanic was spoken roughly 2,500 years ago (around 500 BC) in southern Scandinavia and along the southern Baltic coast. Nobody wrote Proto-Germanic down, so we’ve reconstructed it by comparing later Germanic languages and working backward. Proto-Germanic itself descended from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of almost all European languages, spoken perhaps 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.
The Three Branches
As Germanic speakers migrated and spread, Proto-Germanic gradually split into three branches. North Germanic became the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese). West Germanic became English, German, Dutch, Frisian, and several smaller languages. East Germanic, which included Gothic, went extinct — the last known East Germanic speakers disappeared somewhere around the 16th or 17th century in Crimea. This three-way split was well underway by the first century AD, when Roman authors first described the Germanic peoples.
The Oldest Recorded Germanic
The oldest substantial text in any Germanic language is the Gothic Bible, translated by Bishop Wulfila in the 4th century AD. Gothic was an East Germanic language, now completely extinct. The oldest runic inscriptions in Germanic languages date to around the 2nd century AD, found on objects scattered across Scandinavia and northern Germany. These inscriptions use the Elder Futhark alphabet and give us tiny glimpses of what early Germanic actually sounded like.
Where Frisian Fits In
Frisian belongs to the West Germanic branch, specifically the Anglo-Frisian subgroup alongside English. The earliest written Frisian texts date from the 13th century, which makes Frisian’s written history younger than that of Old English (first written texts around the 7th century) or Old High German (8th century). But the spoken language is just as old — every living Germanic language has been evolving continuously since the Proto-Germanic era. No living Germanic language is “older” than any other in any meaningful sense; they’ve all been changing for the same amount of time.
A Timeline of Written Records
For a rough sense of when each major Germanic language first appears in writing: Gothic shows up in the 4th century, Old English in the 7th century, Old High German in the 8th century, Old Norse in the 9th century (though runic inscriptions go back further), Old Saxon in the 9th century, Old Dutch in the 9th century, and Old Frisian in the 13th century. But these dates reflect when people happened to write things down, not when the languages started being spoken. Frisian was certainly a distinct language long before the 1200s; it just took a while for someone to commit it to parchment.
Still Evolving
The Germanic languages are still changing today. English has transformed so dramatically over the past thousand years that Old English is essentially a foreign language to modern speakers. Icelandic, by contrast, has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read medieval sagas with relative ease. Frisian sits somewhere in between — it has changed substantially from its Old Frisian form but retains features that other West Germanic languages lost centuries ago. The family is 2,500 years old and counting, and it’s not done evolving yet.
