Classification
By the 1st century CE, the writings of Pomponius Mela, Pliny the elder, and Tacitus indicate a division of Germanic-speaking peoples into large groupings who shared ancestry and culture. (This division has been appropriated in modern terminology about the divisions of Germanic languages.)
Tacitus, in his Germania wrote (Tac. Ger. 2) that
In their ancient songs, their only way of remembering or recording the past, they celebrate an earth-born god, Tuisco, and his son Mannus, as the origin of their race, as their founders. To Mannus they assign three sons, from whose names, they say, the coast tribes are called Ingævones; those of the interior, Herminones; all the rest, Istævones.
Tacitus also specifies that the Suevi are a very large grouping, with many tribes within it, with their own names. The largest, he says, is the Semnones, the Langobardi are fewer, but living surrounded by warlike peoples, and in remoter and better defended areas live the Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, the Suardones, and Nuithones.
Pliny the Elder, on the other hand, names five races of Germans in his Historia Naturalis (Plin. Nat. 4.28), not three, by distinguishing the two more easterly blocks of Germans, the Vandals and further east the Bastarnae, who were the first to reach the Black Sea and come in contact with Greek civilization. He is also slightly more specific about the position of the Istvaeones, though he also does not name any examples of them:
There are five German races; the Vandili, parts of whom are the Burgundiones, the Varini, the Carini, and the Gutones: the Ingævones, forming a second race, a portion of whom are the Cimbri, the Teutoni, and the tribes of the Chauci. The Istævones, who join up to the Rhine, and to whom the Cimbri belong, are the third race; while the Hermiones, forming a fourth, dwell in the interior, and include the Suevi, the Hermunduri, the Chatti, and the Cherusci: the fifth race is that of the Peucini, who are also the Basternæ, adjoining the Daci
Note that the remote Varini are listed as being in the Suebic or Hermionic group by Tacitus, above, and the eastern Vandalic or Gothic group by Pliny, so the two accounts do not match perfectly. In these accounts and others from the period, emphasis is often made upon the fact that the Suebi and their Hermione kin formed an especially large and mobile nation, which at the time were mainly living mainly near the Elbe, both east and west of it, but they were also moving westwards into the lands near the Roman frontier. Pomponius Mela in his slightly earlier Description of the World (III.3.31) places "the farthest people of Germania, the Hermiones" somewhere to the east of the Cimbri and the Teutones, and further from Rome, apparently on the Baltic. Strabo however describes the Suebi as going through a period where they were pushed back east by the Romans, in the direction they had come from:
the nation of the Suevi is the most considerable, as it extends from the Rhine as far as the Elbe, and even a part of them, as the Hermonduri and the Langobardi, inhabit the country beyond the Elbe; but at the present time these tribes, having been defeated, have retired entirely beyond the Elbe.
By the end of the 5th century the term "Gothic" was used more generally in the historical sources for Pliny's "Vandals" to the east of the Elbe, including not only the Goths and Vandals, but also Gepids along the Tisza and the Danube, the Rugians, Sciri and Burgundians, even the Iranian Alans.
These groups moved and inter-acted over the next centuries, and separate dialects among Germanic languages developed down to the present day. Linguists have sometimes used the terminology of the classical sources to name medieval divisions within Germanic. The names of the sons of Mannus, Istvaeones, Irminones, and Ingvaeones, are used to divide up the medieval and modern West Germanic languages, while the more easterly groups such as the Vandals are thought to be the origins of Eastern Germanic languages, the most famous of which is Gothic. The dialect of the Germanic people who remained in Scandinavia is in contrast not called Ingvaeonic, but is classified as North Germanic, which developed into Old Norse. Within the West Germanic group, linguists associate the Hermiones (or "Irminones") are proposed to have spoken an "Elbe Germanic" which developed into Upper German including modern German. More speculatively, given the lack of any such clear explanation in any classical source, modern linguists designate the Frankish language (and its descendant Dutch) as Istvaeonic, sometimes referred to as "Weser-Rhine Germanic", in distinction to its close relatives Low German, Anglo-Saxon and Frisian, which are designated as Ingvaeonic, which are slightly more related to Norse, and also sometimes referred to as "North-Sea Germanic". But because Germanic languages such as Frankish, Low German, and English were long mutually intelligible to some extent, and formed by the mixing of migrating peoples after the classical period, it is not clear how well these medieval dialect divisions correspond to those mentioned by Tacitus and Pliny. For example, in Tacitus (Tac. Ger. 40) and in Claudius Ptolemy's Geography, the Anglii, ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, are designated as being a Suebic tribe.
There are other reasons that the modern ethno-linguistic distinctions are not necessarily the same as the ancient terminologies they are based upon. For example some classical "Germani" near the Rhine may not have originally spoken Germanic languages, and sometimes tribes speaking Germanic languages, such as the Suebi, were even distinguished from the Germani. Furthermore, other many Greek scholars did not use the term, only mentioning Celts and Scythians in the north of Europe, with people now remembered as Germanic being categorized as Celtic in the west and Scythian in the modern nomadic east. Though speaking Germanic languages, the Eastern Germanic Goths were sometimes classified as Scythians and even said to descend from the ancient Getae.
Read more about this topic: North Germanic Peoples