The Germanic substrate hypothesis is a hypothesis that some have ventured that attempts to explain the distinctiveness of the Germanic languages within the Indo-European language family. It ventures that the reason for the distinctiveness of the Germanic languages is because they represent, in essence, a creole language: a contact language between Indo-European speakers and a non-Indo-European substrate language spoken by some of the ancestors of the speakers of the Proto-Germanic language.

That the Germanic languages form a markedly distinct group within Indo-European is beyond question. Grimm's law was a profound sound change that affected all of the stops inherited from Indo-European. The Germanic languages also share common innovations in grammar as well as in phonology: more than half of the noun cases featured in languages such as Sanskrit or Lithuanian are not present in Germanic.¹ The Germanic verb has also been extensively remodelled, showing fewer grammatical moods, and markedly decreasing the inflections in use for the passive voice.

The Germanic substrate hypothesis attempts to explain these features as a result of creolization with a non-Indo-European language. Writing an introductory article to the Germanic languages in The Major Languages of Western Europe, Germanicist John A. Hawkins sets forth the arguments for a Germanic substrate. Hawkins argues that the proto-Germans encountered a non-Indo-European speaking people and borrowed many features from their language. He hypothesizes that the first sound shift of Grimm's Law was the result of non-native speakers attempting to pronounce Indo-European sounds, and that they resorted to the closest sounds in their own language in their attempt to pronounce them. The Battle-axe people is an ancient culture identified by archaeology who have been proposed as candidates for the people who influenced Germanic with their non-Indo-European speech. Proponents of the theory sometimes call the alleged non-Indo-European element in Germanic Folkish, on the assumption that the Germanic root folk is not an Indo-European word.

Hawkins moreover asserts that more than one third of the native Germanic lexicon is of non-Indo-European origin, and again points to the hypothetical substrate language as the cause. Certain lexical fields are dominated by non-Indo-European words according to Hawkins. Seafaring terms, agricultural terms, words about war and weapons, animal and fish names, and the names of communal and social institutions are centers of non-Indo-European words according to Hawkins. Some English language examples given by Hawkins include:

• Seafaring vocabulary
  • sea
  • ship
  • strand
  • keel
  • boat
  • rudder
  • mast
  • ebb
  • steer
  • sail
  • north
  • south
  • east
  • west
• Warfare and weapons
  • sword
  • shield
  • helmet
  • bow
• Animal and fish names
  • carp
  • eel
  • calf
  • lamb
  • bear
  • stork
• Communal and social institutions
  • king
  • knight
  • thing
• Miscellaneous vocabulary items
  • drink
  • leap
  • bone
  • wife

Many of Hawkins's purported non-etymologies are controversial. One obvious way to refute the Germanic substrate hypothesis is to find Indo-European etymologies for the words on Hawkins's list. This process continues, but several cited as examples by Hawkins can likely be stricken. For example, it is generally agreed that helmet represents IE *kel-, a concealing covering. East relates to IE *aus-os-, "dawn." Some of the words may have Indo-European derivations that are simply not well preserved in other Indo-European languages. For example, it has been suggested that wife is related to Tocharian B kwipe, "vulva", from a reconstructed root *g^wibh-. Calvert Watkins's original 1969 appendix of Indo-European roots in the American Heritage Dictionary listed quite a few roots that were believed to be unique to Germanic at that time. More recent editions have cut back substantially on the number of roots claimed to be unique in Germanic.

As such, more recent treatments of Proto-Germanic tend to reject or simply omit discussion of the Germanic substrate hypothesis. Joseph B. Voyles 's Early Germanic Grammar makes no mention of the hypothesis, nor do most other recent publications on the Germanic language family.

References

• John A. Hawkins, "Germanic Languages", in The Major Languages of Western Europe, Bernard Comrie, ed. (Routledge, 1990) ISBN 0-415-04738-2
• Joseph B. Voyles, Early Germanic Grammar (Academic Press, 1992) ISBN 0-12-728270-X
• Robert S. P. Beekes, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (John Benjamins, 1995) ISBN 1-55619-505-2
• Calvert Watkins (ed.), The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Houghton Mifflin, 1985) ISBN 0-395-36070-6
• Calvert Watkins (ed.), The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, second edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) ISBN 0-618-08250-6
• Orrin W. Robinson, Old English and its Closest Relatives: A Study of the Earliest Germanic Languages (Stanford, 1992) ISBN 0-8047-2221-8

Notes

¹ Other Indo-European languages attested much earlier than the Germanic languages, such as Hittite, also have a reduced inventory of noun cases. It is not certain whether Germanic and Hittite have lost them, or whether they never shared in their acquisition.