The most important force in shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar which. Some of these features were specific to the West Germanic language family to which Old English belongs.
The following innovations are common to the West Germanic languages:
- Loss of final /z/ (except in short monosyllables)
- Change of voiced dental fricative /ð/ to stop /d/
- Change of voiceless dental fricative /þ/ to stop /d/ after /l/ (except when /þ/ is word-final)[18]
- West Germanic germination of consonants, except r, before /j/ in short-stemmed words (gemination of /p/, /t/, /k/ and /h/ is also observed before liquids), but not if /j/ (or a liquid) is vocalised (becomes syllabic) word-finally
- The simplification of /ngw/ to /ng/
- A particular type of umlaut /e-u-i/ > /i-u-i/
- Loss of /j/ before /i/ and /w/ before /u/ in endings
- Changes to the 2nd person singular past-tense: Replacement of the past-singular stem vowel with the past-plural stem vowel, and substitution of the ending -t with -i
- Short forms (*stān, stēn, *gān, gēn) of the verbs for "stand" and "go"; but note that Crimean Gothic also has gēn
- The development of a gerund
