For and Against Anglo-Frisian: The Linguistic Debate on the Matter Katarzyna Buczek University of Opole, Poland ABSTRACT: The relationship between Old English and Old Frisian, and the possible existence of their Anglo-Frisian proto-language, has been the subject of scholarly investigation for a long time. For those who accept the traditional comparative method for detecting the genetic relationships between languages, both Old English and Old Frisian arose due to some regular language changes from a common Anglo-Frisian ancestor. Nevertheless, the notion of Anglo-Frisian is not regarded as self-evident by all linguists. The primary aim of this paper is to investigate the existing arguments for and against the Anglo-Frisian hypothesis. Firstly, it will be the purpose of the paper to outline various linguistic approaches to the investigation of Anglo-Frisian relations, which have appeared since the late medieval times. The second part of the article will be devoted to the analysis of morphological and phonological innovations of Old English and Old Frisian and the presentation of possible interpretations of these innovative changes. In the third part of the paper, the notion of common Anglo-Frisian runic innovations will be presented simultaneously with the possible distribution of Anglo-Frisian runes based on the archaeological findings. KEYWORDS: Anglo-Frisian, Old English, Old Frisian, Germanic languages, historical linguistics 1. Introduction The history of a language is always closely related to the history of the people using it. Due to that, in order to present a reliable study of Anglo-Frisian, one has to analyze the external history of the region, as well as the influence of historical events. As Bremmer (1990: 354) reports, Germanic peoples generally did not use writing in order to present historical events, thus, there is a lack of documents which would describe the Adventus Saxonum in general, not to mention those that would give specific and detailed information about tribes such as the Frisians taking part in it. The first mention of the tribes coming to Britain came, as suggested by Bremmer (1981: 49), from Byzantium and was made by Procopius of
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