Elbe Germanic, also called Irminonic or Erminonic, is a proposed subgrouping of West Germanic languages introduced by the German linguist Friedrich Maurer (1898–1984) in his book, Nordgermanen und Alemanen, to describe the West Germanic dialects ancestral to Lombardic, Alemannic, and Bavarian.[1]:17–18 During late antiquity and the Middle Ages, its supposed descendants had a profound influence on the neighboring West Central German dialects and, later, in the form of Standard German, on the German language as a whole.[2] While most scholars accept the existence of an Elbe Germanic archaeological group, the existence of a linguistic group remains controversial.[3]
Maurer asserted that the cladistic tree model, which was used ubiquitously in linguistics in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, was too inaccurate to describe the relation between the modern Germanic languages, especially those belonging to its Western branch. Rather than depicting Old English, Old Dutch, Old Saxon, Old Frisian and Old High German to have simply 'branched off' a single common 'Proto-West Germanic', which many previous linguists equated to "Old German / Urdeutsch", he assumed that there had been much more distance between certain dialectal groupings and proto-languages.[6]:113–114
12Maurer, Friedrich (1942). Nordgermanen und Alemannen: Studien zur germanische und frühdeutschen Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde. Strasbourg: Hünenburg.
↑Mildenberger, Gerhard; Beck, Heinrich (2010) [1989]. "Elbgermanen". Germanische Altertumskunde Online.
James, Edward (1988). The Franks. The Peoples of Europe. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell. ISBN0-631-17936-4.
Gregory of Tours (1997) [1916]. Halsall, Paul (ed.). History of the Franks: Books I–X (Extended Selections). Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Internet History Sourcebooks Project, History Department, Fordham University, New York. Translated by Ernst Brehaut. Columbia University Press.
