dialects - Which native English speakers are linguistically the most "germanic"?


English is a Germanic language. Another significant Germanic language is of course German.


Which native English speakers are the closest to German basing on the following criteria?



  • accent-wise (South Africa?)

  • German words and phrases (US? e.g. "to schlep" for "to carry")

  • grammar-wise (US again? e.g. slang "If I would" for "If I was")



Answer



There's no really good answer to this question, but we can take a stab at it if we accept some very broad generalisations.


English is a Germanic language by virtue of being descended from Proto-Germanic (which is a matter of geography and historical migration patterns). Setting aside the question of English dialects for a moment, among all the Germanic languages we can say that a language is "more Germanic" if it has undergone fewer changes since splitting from Proto-Germanic. The ideal way to do this would be to do a detailed inventory of linguistic changes apparent in a language and analyse how many steps might have been taken to get from Proto-Germanic to the modern language, but that's a load of work. A very broad generalisation that is less work would be to look at how many forks in the family tree exist between a language and Proto-German. This is much easier to see. (As an amusing aside, you can see from the family tree that Swedish is—among several others—"more Germanic" than modern German.)


By analogy, we can say that the English dialect that is closest to Proto-Germanic is the English dialect that is closest to an earlier branch in the family tree. Or, put another way, the oldest dialect of English will be the closest to Proto-Germanic, and hence the "most Germanic" dialect of English.


We can quickly rule out any English dialect outside of the British Isles, since English dialects in the rest of the world are descended from some form of British Isles English, and hence would be at least one more step removed.


Of course, such a detailed analysis of English dialects is also prohibitively complicated, but at least it gives us the conceptual framework to figure out that "oldest British Isles English dialect" is what we're looking for. So, we'll have to go with anecdote and hearsay: the Geordie dialect is the oldest dialect in the British Isles, according to current opinion.


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