Anglic

The Anglic languages are grouped with the Frisian languages in the proposed Anglo-Frisian sub-branch of the West Germanic languages, though this relationship, while historically well supported, has been criticized by many modern scholars as a doubtful phylogenetic grouping. An alternative view holds that the Ingvaeonic languages instead formed a dialect continuum stretching along the North Sea that only later diverged into distinct languages, Old English, pre-Old Frisian and Old Saxon, during the Migration Period of the fifth century, though proponents of a genuine Anglo-Frisian node still point to strong archaeological and genetic evidence for the intermingling of these groups. In the 1950s the linguist Hans Kuhn argued the two languages diverged at the Ingvaeonic level but later reconverged, a view since dismissed as improbable given the geographic distance separating early English and Frisian speakers.