User:Rex Germanus/Is German a dialect of Dutch or the other way around?

Disclaimer: This page contains an essay-like article, and is not a regular wikipedia article.On the other hand, this is a serious article and ,although it might contain some humour,it is not a joke.

Reason for writing this article
The Dutch language, is a relatively small language.It currently is ranked at place 37 which 22 million speakers as of 2005. German on the other hand has 101 million native speakers and is therefore ranked as the number 10 when one looks at the total of native speakers worldwide. Because of its proximity to the German language, and because its relatively exotic status (ie. Worldwide little is known about the language) certain people used to, and some still, think that the Dutch language is a dialect of German. I always thought this was very funny, people always came up with the most amusing stories and theories about why Dutch was a German dialects.Some people on wikipedia, who can speak German also list a userbox on their userpage saying that they can speak Dutch as well, assuming that Dutch and German and either the same language or so mutually intellible they could be the same language.In these discussions I often say that "the statement that German is a dialect of Dutch is easier to defend than the other way around". This article will explain why.

What is a dialect?
The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" ("אַ שפראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט", "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"; in Yivo-bleter 25.1, 1945, p. 13), illustrating the fact that languages are created by assimilation.

Many historical linguists view every speech form as a dialect of the older medium of communication from which it developed. This point of view sees the modern Romance languages as dialects of Latin, modern Greek as a dialect of ancient Greek, and Tok Pisin as a dialect of English. This paradigm is not entirely problem-free. It sees genetic relationships as paramount; the "dialects" of a "language" (which itself may be a "dialect" of a yet older tongue) may or may not be mutually intelligible. Moreover, a parent language may spawn several "dialects" which themselves subdivide any number of times, with some "branches" of the tree changing more rapidly than others. This can give rise to the situation where two dialects (defined according to this paradigm) with a somewhat distant genetic relationship are mutually more readily comprehensible than more closely related dialects. This pattern is clearly present among the modern Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which neither language shares with French, despite both languages being genetically closer to French than to each other: French has undergone more rapid change than have Spanish and Italian.

What's it all about
The Dutch language is currently dated to be older than the German language as written documents containing Dutch date back much further.(See: Salic Law)

But this isn't the most important argument.The most important argument is the High German(ic) Consonant Shift.This shift created a breach within the continental West Germanic languages as it created the Low German(ic) languages, who did not shift and the High German(ic) language, which did experience the shift, hence the name.

Note: "German" as in High and Low should not be compared to the modern sense of the word."German" here refers to the ancestor of the continental west Germanic languages, this language could just have easily been called "Dutch" or even "Honky tonky Paraflapsic" for that matter.

Dutch, being a Low German(ic) language, did not experience the shift.German, being a High German(ic) language did. Therefore Dutch is closer to the original form of common West Germanic than German is.When people hear about the High and Low German(ic) language they often think the language tree looks a bit like this:

Common Continental West Germanic |                 |                  |               (HGCS) / \               /   \                /     \                     /       \                        /         \                        /           \               /             \                    /               \            /                 \                  Low Germanic      High Germanic

While actually, this would be more accurate:

Common Continental West Germanic |                 |                  |               (HGCS) |\                 | \                   |  \                         |   \                             |    \_ _                               |        \                      |         \                            |          \                     |           \                                 |            \              Low Germanic    High Germanic

Due to the High German(ic) consonant shift, what we know call, High German(ic) languages splitt of from Common West Germanic, which resulted into 2 subgroups.The languages that didn't experience the shift were now called Low Germanic and the ones that did High Germanic. Although the Low Germanic languages are much closer to the original form, they can't have the same name because Continental Common West Germanic was (like the name already says) "Common", which it could be anymore as there were now 2 different groups.

Conclusion
Because the oldest form of, what we now call Dutch, wasn't present at the time of the High German consonant shift German cannot be called a direct dialect of Dutch. The two languages had a common ancestor, an ancestor to which Dutch has remained closer than German. Dutch (and languages that descended from it) is the only remaining true low German(ic) language, all the others have been assimilated or reduced to dialects by the High German standard language. So Dutch is closer to the common ancestor of both Dutch and German, but not the ancestor of German itself.Thus German cannot be a dialect of Dutch, but in the same way Dutch can never be a dialect of German.