Thus East Frankish, whish is included in South German in the usual shifth based scheme, is according to Engels a product of later mixing of various Old German tribal dialects under the historical conditions of colonisations. As for the elements of other languages Slavic ones, extremely rare in Main Franconia, they were absorbed in the process of mixixng, just as throughout the are of East German colonisation.

The most striking illustration of the superficial sketchiness of the traditional classification is the Ripuarian dialect of the Cologne area, which Engels studied particulary closely. As we have pointed out, it is included, on the shift criteria, in Middle German, along with the Mosel dialect, to form the Middle Frankish group unshifted dat, wat,et, etc. and opposed to the neighbournig Low Frankish as a Low German dialect. The shift boundary, passing between Low German and High German north of Cologne and south of Düsseldorf the Benrath Line, is of the greatest and fundamental significance in is classification, dividing the two principal groups of dialects of the dialects of the Germann language.

In Engel´s view, however, the Ripuarian dialect is essentially Low German in character s.505, and it hes mush less in common with those dialects with which it is lumped together under name of Middle Frankish than with the so-called Low Frankish subdialects s.506. Of the Low german features of Ripauarian, pariculary significative, in Engel´s view, is the retention of voiced consonants b, d, g, which are confused with voiceless ones p, t, k, in Middle and South German. Only ehere the impossibility becomes apparent to distinguish clarly between b and p and t, g and k at the beginning of words, what the French refer to in particular as accent allemand the German accent.- V.Zh., only there does as Low German feel the great cleft which the second consonant shift tore througt the German language. And that cleft passes between the Sieg and the Lahn, between the Ahr and the Mosel s.516, in other words, between the Ripuarian and Mosel dialects the areas of Cologne and Trier.

To corroborate this statement, Engels appeals to the immediate language attitudes of the users of the given dialects, to the collective social experiences of the locals, including his own. The dialect of neuB is identical with that of Krefeld and Munich Glabach even to the minutiate indiscernible to a stranger´s ear. Despite this, one is declared to be Berg industrial area passes in imperceptible stages into that of the south western Rhine Palatinate. Despite this, they are said to belong to two basically different groups. For anyone who is at home in his area, it is obvious that here book learning is trying to force the living popular dialects, of which it knows little or nothing at all, into the Procustean bed of a priori constructed criteria s.506. But in this way a group of dialects beloning together owing to definite sound correlations shwon above, and still perceived by the people´s consciousness as belonig together, are arbitrarily sundered on the basis of a completely accidental criterion s. 505.

On the other hand, while there is no noticiable boundary between Low Frankish and Ripuarian, both dialects, being Frankish in their origin, differ sharply from Low Saxon, with wich Low Frankish is united according to the accepted classification in the framework of Low German as having no consonant shift. These interrelations are shown by Engels with illustraton from the boundary subdialect of his native Berg industrial district. While it passes in imperceptible stages from village to village, from farm to farm into the dialect of the Rhine Palatinate, it is very sharply ditinguished from the Saxon dialect on the Westphalian border. Probably nowhere elsein the whole of Germany is there another so clearly drawn language boundary to be found as here. And what a contrast in the language! The whole of the vocalism is revolutionised, as it were: a very broad ai is directly opposed to the sharp Low Frankish ei,as is au to ou; of the numerous and semivowels, not a single one tallies; sch as throughout the rest of Germany, there, s+ch as in Holland; here , wi hant, there, wi hebbed; here, the dual forms get and enk, ihr and euch used for theplural, there, only ji, i and jü, ü; here, the sparrow Sperling is called by the common Ripuarian word Môsche, there, by the common Westphalian Lüning s.506-7.


Thus Engels questions the validity of the shift as a criterion for the division of the Frankish subdialects, particulary where this division is substantiated merely by the High German shift in the tree cases, which is not even consistently implemented s.505 the reference being to et, dat, and wat as the distinctive feature of the Middle Frankish subdialect. To the Rhine Franconian himself, the penetration of the shifting of t and final k has so litle meaning as a language border that he has to thing hard, even in an area he knows well, where the boundary lies between t and z, between k and ch;and in crossing the border, the one slips nearly as easily off his tonge as the other. This is made all the easier by the numerous High German words with shifted sz, z, ch and f wich have penetrated the dialects s.507

Of particularly great significance is Engel´s indication that the penetration of the shift into the region of the Ripuarian subdialects is not always consistent. Words containig consonant shift penetrated, from olden times, into Low German to be more precise, into Low Frankish as isolated lexical borrowings, so that what happened here was, in fact, isolated word movements rather than a spontaneous sound change or a shift of definite sounds as such.


To support this idea, which prefigures one of the most important conclusion of the work on the modern linguistic atlases, Engels turns to the written monuments of the Early New German epoch. In the Berg legal code of the 14th century he finds, side by side with zween, bezahlen with the t>z shift also setten, dat nutteste das nützlichste retaining unshifted t; Dache, redelich with the k>ch shift next to reicket reich without the shift; verkouffen with the p>f shift and upheven aufheben, ulper Helfer without the shift and even zo and tho zu in one paragraph. In short, the dialects of the hills and of the plain are mixed up all the time without the least inconvenience to the writer. As always, this last wave, with which the High German shift inundated the Frankish area, was the weakest and shallowest. It is certanily of interest to mark the which it reached. But this line cannot be a dialect border; it cannot break up an independent group of dialects closely related since old times, or provide a pretext for including the forcibly separated fragments in less closely related groups, in contradiction to all the language facts s.507-08.


Despite the fact that Engels could only rely on very limited dialectological data, his conclusions on the consonant shift, and in particular on the historical position of the Ripuarian dialect of the Cologne area, were far ahead of the liguistics of this times, being later fully borne out by modern German dialectology.

It was the Rhine Province that served, alredy in the laate 19th and in particular the 20th century, as a kind of testing ground for intense dialectological work. The start of this work was George Wenker´s pamphlet Das rheinische Platt Düsseldorf, 1877, the results of the firs comprehensive study by means of questionnaires, by the future compiler of the German dialectological atlas, of the Low Frankish subdialects, which form a transition from Low German to High German in the region of his native city, Düsseldorf. This little book, printed st the author´s expense in a few copies, remained unknow to Engels. Wenker´s work was follwed by a number of monographic studies of the individuals subdialects of the same area. Later, the maps of the shift in the handwritten Dialectological Atlas of Germany Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs, based on a complete survey by of questionnaries, despite the technical inadecuacy of the questionnaire method of the German atlas, extended the general picture of the boundaries of the individuals phenomena of the shift, alreay outlined by Wenker. The year of 1908 saw the beginning of the publication of a series of monographs Deutsche Dialektgeographie, written mostly by pupils of Prof.Wrede, who directed the compilation of the atlas, with descriptions of the dialect of a defiinite from the atlas data complemented by detailed phonetic records in the field. Most ofthe works published in the first issues of the series were concerned with the dialectography of the Rhine Province, the subject matter of Engel´s study. Among these, particulary prominent were the works of prof.Frings, who later published fundamental works on the history of the Rhenish dialects in connection with the history of the Province. Extensive data on lexical geography are contained in the many volume dialectological Rhenish Dictionary, which published, beginning with Volume III, the maps of the distribution of the entry words.


After many years of collecting and research, the picture of the consonant shift in the Rhine Province is now quite different from the simplistic and sketchy diagram envisaged by Braune and his contemporaries at time when the firs classification of German dialects based on shift features was suggested. The dynamics of the languages map come to life, with gradual High Germanisation of the Rhine Province i.e., of the Frankish dialect resulting from advance of separate words, particulary in the area of the Ripuarian dialect which, as Engels correctly discerned, succumbed to this High Germanisation later than others.


As Wenker established already in his firs work, the words ich, och auch run ahead of the general shift boundary, theth is, the Benrath Line machen maken and other basic phenomena some 10 km south of Düsseldorf, extending in their High German form as far as the village of Urdingen on the Rhine, 25 km below Düsseldorf the Urdingen Line. The transitional belt between two boundaries, and in the firs place the urban dialects of this zone, absorbed a number widespread words of the basic vocabulary stock wit shifed consonants, particulary with the affricate z for LG t e.g.,inthe words like Salz, Herz, Holz, Schwanz, zwei, Zeit, and some others, les often shifted spirants e.g. Küche, besser, gross, weiss, and some others. This belt is also crossed by the shift boundary for adjectives with the suffix lich LG lik, or, to more precise, a number of boundaries with fluctuations for different words. The shifted forms of personal pronouns euch, mich dich penetrated much farther to the north than Urdingen, the reflexive sich going farther than any others. The forms of personal pronouns in ch, just as the reflexive sich, were borrowed whole from High German, Low German having a common form for the dative accusative without an ending mi, di, etc. and using an oblique case of the 3rd pers. pronoun hem, em ihm for the reflexive pronoun. The sich form occurs nowadays everywhere in Low German along wih the sik adapted to Low German phonetics.


On the other hand, only the pronous dat, wat, et, det dieses are lagging behind the overall shift, retaining the unshifted t throughout so called Middled Frankish dialect: most of this area also has an unshifted op auf, of which the southern boundary reaches the valley of the Mosel. The nortern part of Middle Frankish, the Ripuarian subdialect of the Cologne area, retains the unshifted p in the combinations rp, lp to be more precise, after a vowel, for a glide is formed between liquids and p: cf. dorap Dorf,etc. However, as the more careful studies by the dialectographers of the Rhine area showed, this province has also retained unshifted forms in a number of the other isolated relic words that have dropped out of their class. Here belong muss and let liess, which are, just as dat, wat, op, syncategorematic words with a weak stress. There is no shift in certain words of intimate or vulgar speech, such as tef Zaub bitch, schnut Schnauze mug, ap Affe only as a term of abuse: du ap!, whereas in the direct sense, as the name of an animal, High German af is used, etc.. The largest group of these unshifted relics is made up of the regional and profesional words in purely local and special use,which do not form part of the basic word stock and have no High German parallels in the literary language either: e.g., wek Doch wick, stut Semel bun, kip Trakorb a special kind of basket, plüten Lumpen rag, fuken Fischreuse weir basket. These words have different boundaries: the unshifted ap Affe covers a large central area of the Ripuarian dialect; the word tef Zaub with an unshifted initial t and Low German final f for b reaches much farther to the south than the dorp dorf line, nearly as far as Koblenz, enveloping not only the whole of Ripuarian but also a considerable northern part the Mosel dialect.


The last group of examples is particularly instructive: it clarly shows thets the advancement of the shift, at any rate in the Middle Frankish area, was not effected by a regular shifting of a sound series as such but by replacement of separate words; where a parallel High German word was absent, the original unshifted form could easily survive. To these relics belongs the word baten nützen, which Engels records in the dialect of the Palatinate: ´s badd alles nix es hilft nichts s.518 from LG bat MLG baz besser. It exist in an unshifted form throughout the whole extent of the Frankish subdialects to the Alamannic boundary.

What conclusions did Germanic philologist draw from all these new facts that had a bearing on historical dialectology? In the last edition of his texbook on the history of the German language, Behagel said this on the Middle Frankish dialect: I believe it problable that the whole Middle Frankish area was originally Low German. Frings, whom Behaghel cities in this connection, refers the spreading of the shift in this area to the period between 800 and 1200. This process says Frings is implemented through gradual High Germanisation Verhochdeutschung, and a great many exceptions were preserved. One should therefore speak of words with shifted sounds lautverschobene Wörter rather than of a sound shift Lautverschiebung.


The final establishment of the northern boundary of the shift the Urdingen Line is referredby Frings to a still later date, between 1200 and 1500. It was connected with the colonial expansion of the Electorate of Collogne in the northern direction, with the absorption in it of a number of small feudal territories between Cologne in the duchy of Cleves Kleve, with the gradual extension of the Cologne culturalzone of influence towards the Maas and down the Rhine. The merging of the Franks and Alemanni after Covis´ victory in 496 and the Franks´ advance into the Alamannic lands in theh southern reaches of the Rhine wasthe beginning of the this movements; arround 1000, forms with the shift stood in their bulk before the gates of Cologne, and around 1500 they reached their present northern boundary. The spreading of the consonant shift thus lasted nearly 1.000 years in the Frankish dialect area.


Indeed, the spreading of the shift to the north may have brought together the Ripuarian dialect of the Cologne province with that of Mosel Trier within the general frame work of that is now called Middle Frankish but a much greater number of features still unites Ripuarian with Low Frankish and through it, with Low German: retention of the non-diphthongised old narrow long i,~u,ü wis weiss, brun braun, hück heute; retention of ü, ö without delabialisation characteristic of High German dialects; retention of the voiced unshifted d instead of t düsent instead of tausend and in general, voiced plosives b, d, g, which are pronouced as weak voiceless sounds in High German diallects: that accent allemand which Engels believed to be the most important distinive feature of High German consonantism s.516; the spirant f instead of b at the end of the word: cf. graf Grab, af-ab, etc., andfinally, a number of lexical features. These differences fall in different times and do not coincide in their boundaries, but in most cases these boundaries lie between Ripuarian and Mosel, forming a vibration zone between the old electorates of Coogne and Trier separated in the past by a number of small feudal possessions.


Frings therfore also objects to classifying the Rhine dialects according to the shift criterion, which brings together the Ripuarian and Mosel dialects in Middle Frankish, separating the former from Low Frankish; being a native of the Rhine Province, he appeals tho the immediate language feeling of the locals in nearly the same expressions as Engels. The division of the Rhine language region accepted at present is naturally founded largely on criteria offered by sources on parchment or paper, in the firs place on the most striking and therfore earliest elaborated, extolled and overrated phenomenon of the second or Higth German shift. An inhabitant of the north of the Rhine area, one from Cleves, for instance such as Frigs himself, feels to be closer related linguistically to an inhabitant of Cologne than one from Trier. Nevertheless, the linguist laid down between the man from Cleves and the man from Cologne the primary language boundary, the low German High German consonant shift line, designating in particular the area of Cleves, of the low Rhine dialects starting from NeuB and Düsseldorf, as Low Frankish, and the area of Cologne and Trier, as Middle Frankish. Just as Engels, Frings sees the river Ahr as the deepest fault in the Rhenish language landcape. Therfore one feels, despite the Benrath Zone that is, the boundary between Low German and High German, that the most decisive cleft in the Rhenish language landscape lies in the Ahr area, i.e., between the Ripuarian and Mosel dialects.


Thus painstaking specialist research of the most recent times has fully corroborated Engels´ brilliant foresight. This was confirmed by prof. Frings, the elder of the modern German dialectologists. Having read in 1946 Engels´paper published in the USSR, he stated in a review published in the newspaper Tägliche Rundschau on August 18, 1946: What we discovered on the Rhine as a result of painstaking and hard work, had been clear to Engels 40 years before that. Engels´work, written at a time of absolute sway of the Neogrammarians, rejects a purely physiological consideration of language based on natural scientific regularities. Instead of the immobile, frozen and isolated phenomena, instead of dogmatic rules, Engels sees historical movement and historical life. Without stating this in so many words, he makes the transition to a socio historical consideration of language.


We see froom the example of the Frankish dialect that his characterisation of it rest on a whole series of features, phonetic, grammatical and even lexical. The following phonetic features of the Frankish dialects are listed: short e for i brengen bringen, kreb Kripe, hemel Himmel, ben bin, etc.; lees consistently, short o for u before a nasal sound gonst Gunst, hond Hund, jong jung, etc.s.500, 501; spirant g and b between vowels cf. examples from the dialect of the Palatinate:Flechel, Flegel, geleche gelegen, gsach gesagt, Bûwe Bube, glâwe glaube, selwer selbst, etc.. From the sphere of grammar, such features are indicated as the n ending to mark 1st pers. sg. pres. t.: don ich tue, han ich habe, biddon ich bitte, wirthon ich werde in Old Frankish texts. This verb form obtains throughout the Lower Rhine and Mosel areas, at leats up the border with Lorraine: don, han. The n form recorded by Engels is, from a historical standpoint, the ending of verbs in mi, which gradually became widespread in the Rhenish dialects, beginning already from the Old German period, as a distinctive feature of the 1st person.


Wordbuilding forms are also mentioned, such as the endings of diminutives, which are a very essential delimitating feature of dialects, in the Netherlandish language: tje, je from ken, with palatalisation, borrowed from Frisian: mannetje Männchen, pl. manneties, halsje Hälschen, etc.; in Ripuarian schen, pl.sches: männschen pl. männsches s. 502,504-04. Less general phenomena are also indicated, e.g., the specific features of grammatical gender of some substantives: In all the Salian and Ripuarian dialects Bach stream, or Beek, without shifting is femenine. This also holds for at least the greater, western part of Middle Frankish s.516.

As should be particulary clear from two last examples, nott of the features indicated coincided in their boundaries: spirant b and g are a common Frankish feature, while other traits cover the Frankish dialects only partially don, han or occur beyond their boundaries, too die Bach. It is essential, however, that the hisstorically formed ensemble of these traits characterises the dialect as a whole.
Engels also touches on differences in dialect vocabulary, the geography of words Wortgeographie, which even as late as the beginning of the 20th century did not attract the attention of German dialectologist, who assumed together with Wrede that the boundaries of words are of a much later origin boundaries of sounds and grammatical forms. The local synonyms for the word sparrow which Engels list go back to very ancient differences between Low Saxon and Frankish: the word Lüning Lüling is characteristic of the modern Low Saxon dialects and is recoded as a Germanic word hliuning already in Old Saxon glosses; Mosche in its phonetic variants mesch, mosch, müsch occurs both in Midddle Frankish and Low Frankish, in particular in Netherlandish mush, mosch and is known already in Old Low Frankish texts as muscca, muscha an old Latin borrowing in the Rhenish dialects from the Gall Romance muscio birdie.


Finally, Engels also takes into account the fine geographical differences in the meanings of words: ein sicherer Mann Dutch een zekeren man is used on the Rhine in the meaning ein gewisser Mann a certain man. Many features of the Frankish dialect indicated by Engels are probably more ancient than the second shift, and they override its later bounadries.

More ancient still are those phenomena, partially preserved in modern popular dialects, which Engels notes as the common features of the Ingaevonic dialects Frisians, Old Saxon, Anglo Saxon. Here belongs in particular the disappearance of n before spirants Engels writes before dental sounds;cf. mudh Mund, kudh kund, us uns, other ander. In all the Ingaevonic dialects, the three persons of the plural present indicative end identically, namely in a dental sound with a preceding vowel:in Old Saxon in d, in Anglo Saxon in dh, in Old Frisians in th ...Thus in Old Saxon hebbiad means wir haben. ihr habt, sie haben; and in the same way all the three persons of fallan, gawinnan are identical fallad, winnad. It is the third person that has dominated all three, but, it wouldbe proper to observe, with a specifically Ingaevonic disappearence of n before d or dh, also common to the three dialects mentioned here. Accordingly, in Westphalian it is still said wi, ji, se hebbed, etc..


Engels points to the use of prounouns hè, dè, wè instead of the er, der, wer, usual in the the German language, as a feature which the Istaevonian Frankish dialects Salian and Ripuarian have in common with all Ingaevonic ones.
The problem of the most ancient Ingaevonisms in modern German and Netherlandish dialects, as posed for the firs time by Engels, was only elaborated in the 1920s as a result of studies connected with the German liguistic atlas. A number of other Ingaevonisms were added to those indicated by Engels disappearance of n before spirant, a common form of the plural, pronouns hè, dè,wè. Here belongs an extensive group of personal pronouns without the suffixes r or k: the common form of the dat. and acc. sg.mì mè, dì dè; dì dè; 2nd pers.pl.iù ù, nom.pl. 1st and 2nd pers.wì wè, gì yè: the use of the 3rd pers.pron. in dat.,acc. for the reflexive sich, formation of weak verbs of the III group by means of the suffix j hebben, seggen, the matathesis of r born bronn; bernan, burnan brinnan brennen, therscan dreskan dreschen, etc., differnces in the root and wordbuilding elements of the type nigun niun neun, drüge trucken, trocken, syster swester Schwester, Lexical differnces, e.g., ´`if Weib, frau the latter is not used in the Ingaevonic dialects, and many others.

The unity of the Ingaevonic dialect some of its features being common to the Ingaevonic and Istaevonic groups may be said to have been proved at present by the joint effort of German and Netherlandish dialectologists Frings, Klucke and others. Modern Germanic philology, as represented by Frings who distinguishes between three ancient groups of German more precisely, West Germanic dialects: Küstendeutsch Ingaevonic, Binnendeutsch Istaevonic, and Alpendeutsch Herminonic, thus reverted to the historical division of the German tribes according to Pliny and Tacitus, which Engels took as his starting point.
Accepting this most ancient historically recorded division of the principal tribes and tribal dialects of Western Germans, Engels therey introduced an essentilly new element in the discussion of the language of the German nationality. The traditional classification considered Low German and High German on the genealogical tree model as resulting from the disintegration of Proto Germanic urdeutsch. German and Anglo Frisian were opposed as the two groups of Germanic. Meillet introduced a new correction in this classification, distinguishing in the German lanuage High German, Low German or Saxon and Netherlandish i.e., Low Frankish. However, Engels constructions left no room for Proto Germanic. Indeed, the German nationality is a historical category: it is formed from the group of West Germanic tribes closely related in their origin and language the Franks Istaevones, Bavarians and Alamanni Herminones, later Saxons Ingaevonic in their origin, as Engels pointed out through unificatio and consolidation within the Frankish state of Merovingians and Carolingians.

The final liguistic separation of its western or French part from eastern or German, the division into groups on the basis of language, which was historically recorded in the bilingual Strasbourg oaths, determines according to Engels, the time when the German people in Engels´,the terminology, nationality finally took shape. Let us note that Charlemagne´s Saxons wars, the feudalisation and Cristianisation of Saxon by force, began the incorporation of the Ingaevonic tribes of northern Germany, which were originally closer related linguistically with Frisians and Anglo Saxons, in the historically formed unity of the German nationality, opening the way to extensive influences of the Frankish High German dialects and to a gradual transformation of the Low Saxon Ingaevonic tribal dialectinto one of the local dialects of the German language.

All this compels the conclusion that the traditional, essentilly empirical, descriptive classification of the German dialects must be deemed untenable, claiming as it does the role of a historical genetic scheme explaining the origin of the modern German dialects from the ancient written dialects through spontaneous development and division on the genealogical tree principle.


The consonant shift in the Frankish dialect, the phenomenon underlving the traditional classification, furnishes evidence of the existence of extremely important important boundaries between dialects which arose from intralingual interactions with the neighbouring dialects and corresponding shifting of boundaries on the horizontal plane, rather than from vertical division through fragmentation. In his study, Engels constantly takes into account the concrete possibilities of this kind of interactions, in other words, of mixing of the dialects ofone language, in the earlier periods, primarily due to tribal mixing.

Methodologically, paricularly instructive is his reconstruction of the dialect of the Salian Franks Low Frankish, in the usual classification, which is the basis of the modern Netherlandish dialect and of the New Netherlandish Dutch national literary language. The latter took shape on the territory partially belonging to the Frissians, revealing therefore trace of mixing of Frankish with Frisians Ingaevonisms.

Since the great tidal waves of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries destroyed virtully all Zealand and formed the Zuider Zee, the Dollart and Jade, the political links among the Frisians being disrupted along with the geographical ones, the remnants of the old Frisians freedom fell victim to the onslaught of the surrounding rulers, and with it, rearly eveywhere, the Frisians language. In the west it was hemmed in or completely ousted by Netherlandish, in the east and north, by Saxon and Danish, leaving in all casesstrong traces in the aggresor language. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Old Frisians Zealand and Holland became the nucleus and stronhold of the Netherlands´ struggle for independence, just as they had previously become the seat of the main commercial cities of the country. Here was, then, that the New Netherlandish written language mostly took shape, absorbing Frisian elements, words and word forms, which should be distinguished from the Frankish basic stock.



This analysis of the history of the Netherlandish language in its interconnections with the dialects is a particularly striking example of a dialectical materialism historical study of the development of a language and the history of the people speaking it in their close unity.

The loss by Frissians of the their independent tribal language is viewed by Engels as result of feudal subjugation, while the development of the New Nertherlandish national literary language of the basis of the dialects of Zealand and Holland is linked with the economic flourishing of Holland, the growth of its commercial cities, and its role in the struggle for the national independence of the Netherlands. The dialects of Zealand and Holland retained strong traces of the closely related Frisian which they supplanted, therefore the New Netherlandish literary language, which developed from these dialects, has less affinity with the modern Low Frankish dialects than the medieval Netherlandish language called Middle Netherlandish which developed on a purely Frankish basis. The Middle Netherlandish language, grown on the purely Frankish soil, is here in precise accord with Ripuarian, but written New etherlandish, exposed to the Frisian influence, is less so. Enegels proves this by citing phonettic phenomena characteristic of the Frankish dialects and surviving in the Netherlandish ones: the i> e transition, e.g. es ist, selver Silber; the u>o transition before nasal sounds, e.g., gonst Gunst, konst Kunst, etc..


Engels observes the opposite phenomenon in the Old Saxon written monuments of the 9th century of Westphalian provenance Münster, Essen, etc.. The genitive plural of the masculine gender, of the strong declension, and the nominative singular of the masculine gender, weak declension, ending in o instead of a, and the n ending in the firs person of weak verbs in on thionon, point to Frankish influences. Engels believes that these phenomena are a Frankish survival in the Old West Saxon dialec, which is explained by the fact that Western Saxony i.e., Westphalia was earlier a frankish area. Only after the mass departure of the Franks did the Saxons gradually move via Osning and Egge to the line which still divides mark and Sauerland from Berg and Siegerland. The influence of the Franks left behind and merged now with the Saxons is felt in the phenomena already discussed; it is not to be underestimated even in the modern dialects.


As regards research methodology, it is interesting to point out Engels´ extremely acute observation concerning the liguistic aspects of such dialect mixing. In Old Saxon, as has already been pointed out, the common form of the 1st-3rd person in plural in the present tense has the ending ad fallad, winnad with the disappearence of n before the spirant dh characteristic of the Ingaevonic dialects the old Germanic form of the 3rd person plural nd. In the Cottonian MS of the Old Saxon poem Heliand 9th cenur, 1st-3rd pers. have a common ending nd: tholônd sie dulden, gernônd ihr klagt, etc. Engels compares it with the modern Berg dialect lying on the border of Low Saxon: In the Berg dialect, we also form all three persons of the present tense plural identically, only not on the Saxon model in d, but the Frankish one in nt... On the simple observation that here in the Berge dialect all three persons are formed identically, Braune and others have summarily declared the whole of the mountain Berg area to be Saxon. The rule has of course penetrated from Saxony, but it is regrettably implemented in a Frankish manner and therfore proves the opposite of what t is expexted to prove.


Thus Engels explains the 1st-3rd pers. form in nd in the Old Saxon 9th century monument written on the territory of Westphalia bordering on Franconia, as the identical form of the modern, also borderline, Berg dialect, as a result of the nd-ending, Frankish in its phonetics rentention of n before d, being confused with the Saxon grammatical norm of the plural ending common to all three persons with n disappeaaring before d in Old Saxon.

This example of grammatical contamination is best of all illustrated of b the modern dialectological maps. In full agreement with Engels, German dialectologists now explain the common plural form -en or ent of the present tense characteristic of the borderline Berg dialect, as a contamination uniting the principle of a single ending in Westphalian i.e., according to Engels, the Low Saxon grammatical norm with the Rhenish endings of the 1st and 3rd persons -en. Another example of Frankish influences in he Cottonian MS of the Heliand is, according to Engels, the supplanting of Ingaevonisms disappearance of n before the spirant dh. The Frankish scribe copying the Heliand at Werden uses the form andar for odher twice. In explanation of this confusion of phonetical forms, characteristic of the border are, Engels adds: The Werden registers of dues and taxes waver between the Frankish forms of names Reinswind, Meginswind, and Saxon ones Reinswid and Meginswid. At present, these phenomena are regarded as result of Frankish High German influences on the Ingaevonic substratum of the Low Saxon dialect within the Carolingian state of the Franks.


The same kind of tribal mixing is established by Engels in the case of the southern Frankish dialects on the territory which originally belonged to the Alamanni and was captured by the Franks after Clovis victory over them. Here, we are on a stretch of land, Engels writes, which originally was, undoubtedly, the area of Alamannic conquest not to mention he earlier settlement by Vangiones and others, of whose tribal affinity and language we know nothing, and where a stronger admixture of elements can also be freely acknowledged. But here too, as we need not repeat, the place names point to the presence of not insignificant Ripuarian elements, particulary in the Rhenish plain. The Frankish character of this tongue is supported by examples from the southernmost dialect of the Palatinate, in particula, by its characteristic pronunciation of intervocal b and g as spirants and incomplete implementation of the shift: paff, Pfaff, peife Pfeife, palz Pfalz,etc..

"The proof that the High German shifting is, so to speak, thrust on the dialect from the outside and remains even to the present a foreign which, besides, did not reach the sound stage of the written language (the Alamani and Bavarians going far beyond it whilw retaining on the whole some stage of Old High German) this proof alone is sufficient the predominantly Frankish character of the Palatinate dialect". Here Engels´text breaks off. It should be recalled, however, that it was from the south, from the area of the original settlment of the Alamani, captured and settled by the Franks only at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th century, that the High German(Herminonian in its origin) consonant shift penetrates the Frankish dialect, gradually weakening in its further movement to the north.

But the interaction between related dialects is not restricted, according to Engels, to the period of tribal mixing. In different part of his work (as we already pointed out in connection with the development of the Netherlandish language), he also notes later influences of some dialects on others. In the firs place, as has been mentioned above, the High German consonant shift "penetrated the Rhenish-Frankish dialect that had already taken independently". In the same way, the initial sl, sw, sp became schl, etc., under High German influences, and much later still than the shift took place. "The last of this shifting", writes Engels, "need nott at all disappear on the border of an independent, previously established group of dialects, they can wither away within such a group and actually do so".

These new dialectological boundaries, which did not coincide with the old ones, also arise, in the examples cited by Engels, under the influence of neighbouring dialects rather than through division of the old "principal tongues". Engels does not consider the question of these new boundaries in greater detail. His study being concerned with OLd Germanic tribal dialects, he eliminates these later phenomena (such as the shift) to reach the primary and more an cient oppsitions. He just states the existence of the later dialectological boundaries without considering the causes of their emergence in the new areas, merely mentioning the very fact of extintion of the sound shift "within" separate groups of subdialects rather than in the old boundaries.

Comparison of these dialect lines with the political map of medieval Germany permitted their explanation in terms of the territorial boundaries of the feudal epoch, which presented in a politically divided Germany obstacles for the communication between broad masses of the population up to the time of the Frnch bourgeois revolution and the Napoleonic wars.

One of the most convincing examples of this historical connection between the boundaries of the modern of the modern dialects and medieval feudal territories is precisely the shift lines in the Rhineland largely coinciding with the old political bordes of the Cologne Electorate, with the adjoining feudal possessions of the duchies of Jülich and Berg 8Ripuarian), and the Electorates of Trier (Moses) and the Palatinate( South Rhine Frankish or Pfalz); the shift boundaries in the north (the Benrath and Urdingen lines) are finally established between 1200 and 1500 as a result of settlement of territorial relations between the Electorate of Cologne and the duchy of Cleves (Low Frankish) and are consequently in no way connected with the old border between the Salian and Ripuarian Franks under Clovis, when the shift had not yet affected the area of Frankish settlement.

It would be wrong, however, to follow German dialectologists in their view of the tribal and feudal dialects as mutually exclusive opposites, giving preference, in explaing the modern dialectological boudaries, either to the former (as Bremer did) or to the latter (as is now done by the representatives of the German liguistic geography Wrede and is school). The process of real historical development from languages of kindreds and tribes to those of nationalities, and from the latter to national languages, involves a reshaping of the tribal dialects as a territorial ones owing to changes in territorial borders and accumulation of new dialect features either by spontaneous development of the given dialect or as a result of its interaction with the neighbouring.

This complex historical process determines the totality of the boundaries of language traits characterising a given local dialect as a whole. The task of reconstructing these ancient relatons is, of course, made much easier where the tribal duchies of the early feudal epoch (9th-11th centuries) directly consolidated the old tribal borders and, in their turn, served as a basis for the later feudal territories (12th and 13th centuries), as was the case with Bavaria; similar instances are furnished by the extremely sharp dialect boundary, noted by Engels, between Ripuarian (Fankish) and Saxon, and later between the "Frankish" duchy of Berg and Siegerland and between the "Saxon" countries of Mark and Sauerland, and in the 19th century between the provinces of Rhine and Westphalia. In such cases , later dialect differences also often accumulate on the site of the more ancient language divisions. The Rhine Province, situated along the main commercial route of medieval Germany and wide open to all possible language innovations, which spread down the centuries from the south to the north, is in this respect a much less convenient example. Yet here, too, Engels offered a brilliant model of a historically substantiated reconstruction, lifting the later boudaries and recovering the ancient language relations.

Interaction and resulting closer ties between different dialects of the same language necessarily follow from their employmentt as a means of communication between the users of these different dialects. The neighbouring dialects of a given language, being of common origin, are mutually understandable for speakers on both sides of the dialect border; hence their mutual penetrability, the possibility of interaction and of at least partial mixing, based on identical laws of inner development, and on partial community of grammatical structure and of the basic word stock. Depending on the concrete historical conditions of communication, the mixing may be restricted to the spreading of a individual language innovations, to partial or more complete assimilation, but sometimes it leads to a final supplanting or absorptoin of one dialect by another.

Thus the processes of language development lead not only to further division of local dialects and their differentation, but also, as a result of interaction between them under conditionns of language communication, in a complicated and often contradictory ways, to a levelling out of differences, to intergration, and thus finally to a closer consolidation of the genetically identical language of the whole people. These processes are roted in the economic, political, and cultural links and relations on a more less extensive language territory, developing in the successive historical framewoks of a tribal unions, buddding nationalities and later, nations, under the impact of historical conditions which determine the character and boundaries of communication between men and, consequently, the boundaries between languages and dialects. Later, at the time of risinng capital, the same processes facilate "the concentration of the dialects within a single nation brought about by economic and political concentration, and in the final analysis also the gradual ousting and absorption of a local dialects by the national language.