Middle Low German

Middle Low German
Middle Saxon
Region	Southern Baltic littoral, south-eastern North Sea littoral
Era	Evolved into Modern Low German and was replaced by High German
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Middle Low German
Early forms:	Old Saxon Middle Low German
Dialects	Dutch Low Saxon West Low German East Low German
Writing system	Latin (Fraktur)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	gml
Linguasphere	52-ACB-ca[1]
Northern Europe in 1400, showing the extent of the Hanseatic League

Middle Low German or Middle Saxon (ISO 639-3 code gml) is a language that is the descendant of Old Saxon and the ancestor of modern Low German. It served as the international lingua franca of the Hanseatic League. It was spoken from about 1100 to 1600.

Related languages

Its neighbour languages in the dialect continuum of the West Germanic languages were Middle Dutch to the west and Middle High German to the south, which was later replaced by Early Modern High German.

Middle Low German provided a large number of loanwords to the Nordic languages as a result of the activities of Hanseatic traders. It is considered the largest single source of loanwords in the continental Scandinavian languages, Estonian and Latvian.

History

Middle Low German was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, spoken all around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Based on the language of Lübeck, a standardized written language was developing, though it was never codified.

Traces of the importance of Middle Low German can be seen by the many loanwords found in the Scandinavian, Finnic, and Baltic languages, as well as standard German and English.

In the late Middle Ages, Middle Low German lost its prestige to Early Modern High German, which was first used by elites as a written and, later, a spoken language. Reasons for this loss of prestige include the decline of the Hanseatic League, followed by political heteronomy of Northern Germany and the cultural predominance of Middle and Southern Germany during the Protestant Reformation and Luther's German translation of the Bible.

Literature

• Bible translations into German
• The Sachsenspiegel
• Low German Incunable prints in Low German as catalogued in the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, including the Low German Ship of Fools, Danse Macabre and the novel Paris und Vienne

References

External links

• A grammar and chrestomathy of Middle Low German by Heinrich August Lübben (1882) (in German), at the Internet Archive
• A grammar of Middle Low German by Agathe Lasch (1914) (in German), at the Internet Archive
• Schiller-Lübben: A Middle Low German to German dictionary by Schiller/Lübben (1875) at Mediaevum.de and at the Internet Archive
• Project TITUS, including texts in Middle Low German
• A Middle Low German to German dictionary by Gerhard Köbler (2010)
• Middle Low German influence on the Scandinavian languages