Northwest Germanic

Northwest Germanic is a proposed grouping of the Germanic languages representing the current consensus among Germanic historical linguists, holding that North Germanic and West Germanic, together comprising all Germanic languages surviving today, remained a single subgroup after the East Germanic tribes migrated south, only splitting into North and West Germanic at a later date. Whether this subgroup constituted one unified proto-language, Proto-Northwest Germanic, or simply a set of dialects that stayed in geographic and linguistic contact remains debated; linguists Donald Ringe and Ann Taylor found few changes clearly datable to a Proto-Northwest Germanic period, suggesting any such period of unity was brief, though evidence suggests North and West Germanic kept exchanging innovations even after they had begun to diverge.