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From Indo-European down to West Germanic, Dutch follows the same branch of the linguistic tree as does Frisian. At this point the Frankish dialects branch off again, part of the group of languages classified as Istvaeonic while English and Frisian and Saxon are Ingvaeonic. (The third group under this classification is Herminonic, and includes the more southerly Germanic languages such as Alemannic and Bavarian. This tripartite division, based on Tacitus' writings, does not precisely correspond to linguistic lines but is still in common use.) Some of the Frankish dialects did not take part in the Second or Old High Germanic Sound Shift, which is responsible for German's Pfeffer versus English pepper and is generally considered the divider between High and Low German, while others did. For this reason, the more northerly Frankish dialects sound more allied to the Ingvaeonic and North Germanic languages than to the middle German ones (including modern Hochdeutsch). One of the major Frankish dialects, usually referred to as Old Low Franconian, or, more precisely, Old West Low Franconian, is the Frankish dialect spoken before 1100 a.d. in the area now called the Netherlands, and is thus sometimes called Old Dutch as well. By the end of this period, certain changes had taken place which are now considered characteristic of Middle Dutch, primarily the weakening of full vowels in unstressed syllables, and others such as the voicing of initial s and f (Donaldson 1983:126, Van der Wal and Quak 1994:74). The linguistic period designated as "Middle Dutch" is generally held to encompass the language used from about the 12th century until the beginning of the 16th. The paucity of texts which is so problematic for students of Old Low Franconian (or Old Dutch) is far less of an issue during this period. A number of texts in the vernacular have survived from the 1200s, both legal and literary. Many of them, especially the literary texts, continue to be from the southern areas of Brabant, Limburg, and Flanders, but there are also texts from Noord- and Zuid-Holland, including many of the legal writings since the southern areas held to Latin longer in these cases. Moreover, we have access to the works of the sixteenth-century lexicographer Cornelis Kiliaan, who listed the linguistic origins and areas of usage of a great number of words in his etymological dictionary of the Germanic languages. There is a caveat connected to Kiliaan's impressive work, however: in his striving to present the most complete etymological dictionary of his time, he excerpted heavily from earlier and contemporary works rather than relying solely on his own Brabants dialect and linguistic knowledge. This means that there are a number of errors in his Etymologicum, although he is mostly reliable, especially where his classification of Frisian and Hollands words are concerned (Claes 1991). It should be pointed out, however, that in spite of certain common developments from the Old Dutch period (briefly mentioned above) the term 'Middle Dutch' is a philological convenience, referring to an abstraction, not a unified language - as is in fact the case for all medieval languages. During this period, before the invention and wide spread of printing, each area wrote using its own dialect, the major divisions being Flemish, Brabants, Hollands, Limburgs, and Eastern Dutch. All but the last are Frankish dialects (Van der Wal 1992:108). Moreover, there are differences within this period as well; "certain characteristics of even a given Middle Dutch dialect may have been quite different in 1400 from what they had been in 1200" (Donaldson 1983:127). 'Middle Dutch' may thus be taken here as referring to the variety of dialects which the non-Frisian inhabitants of the Netherlands spoke during this period. In order to clarify cases where I am concerned with the dialect only spoken in the province of Noord-Holland, I shall use the term 'Hollands' to refer to this dialect alone. Other dialects, when discussed, will be referred to directly by name as well. Modern standard Dutch is indicated by its current acronym ABN, which stands for Algemeen Beschaaft Nederlands, 'General Cultivated Dutch.' In the sixteenth century, the northern portions of what is now the Netherlands broke away from the Spanish-Hapsburg empire to form a free Union. The province of Holland became the economic, political, and cultural heart of the republic, and so in the sixteenth century a standard language began here as well, initially developed as a written language. In modern times, dialects and the standard language in Holland form a continuum rather than being clearly distinct, while in other regions of the country they form distinct language systems which may diverge markedly, generally reflected in their geographic distance from the heavily-populated western part of the country referred to as the Randstad. As may be expected, the dialects spoken at the edges of the country are related to what is spoken on the other side of the political border; for example, the dialects of the south east, such as Limburgs, include some forms which have undergone the High German Sound Shift: ich vs. ABN ik (Van Bree and De Vries 1997:1144-5, 1148-49).
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