Grimm and Verner's Laws

This article deals primarily with the laws of Grimm and Verner. For information on Grimm law, see Grimm Act.

For information on laws of phonetic change in general see Genetic change.

The Grimm and Verner laws are a series of phonetic laws that study the phonetic correspondence between the phonemes of languages that are related to each other, as they evolved from Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Many of these laws can be applied to study the evolution of other languages.

These laws assume that a certain sound always behaves in the same way under identical conditions in any language of the same group. This is because languages have historically begun to diverge as groups of speakers split up and their accents diverge. For this reason, the phonetic separations reflect the changes of accents in the group of speakers.

In addition to these phonetic laws, later other authors found more phonetic laws applicable to the description of Indo-European languages.