In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (also called the Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic nasal spirant law) is a description of a phonological development in some dialects of West Germanic, which is attested in Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon. By this sound change, in the combination vowel + nasal + fricative, the nasal disappeared, with compensatory lengthening of the vowel. ("Spirant" is an older term for "fricative".) The sequences in question are original -ns-, -mf-, and -nþ-.
Compare the first person plural pronoun us in various old Germanic languages:
Gothic represents East Germanic, and its correspondence to German and Dutch shows it retains the more conservative form. The /n/ has disappeared in English, Frisian and Old Saxon, with compensatory lengthening of the /u/.
Likewise:
Note that Dutch is inconsistent, following the law in some words but not others; this must be understood in terms of the standard language based on the idiom of the big towns of southern Holland which lost most but not all of its ingvaeonic characteristics under the influence of the language of Brabant: "Met uitzondering van brocht -> bracht kan mogelijke invloed van de noordoostelijke dialecten hier niet ingeroepen worden, want die vertoonden ook vrij veel ingweoonse trekken. Gedacht dient te worden aan een gebied zonder ingweoonse kenmerken en in het licht van de immigratiestromen in die tijd ligt dan veeleer Brabantse invloed voor de hand" (Johan Taeldeman, De opbouw van het AN: meer zuidelijke dan oostelijke impulsen in Tijdschrift voor de Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, deel 123 (2007), afl. 2, p. 104). (Translation: With the exception of brocht -> bracht we can't call upon the north-eastern dialects (to justify the disappeance of ingvaeonic characteristics), as they also show quite a lot of ingvaeonic traits. One must think of another region without ingvaeonic characteristics and in the light of the currents of immigration (to Holland's big southern cities) at that time (after the fall of Antwerp in 1585), an influence from Brabant is much more likely).
Similarly, certain North German dialects retain Old Saxon forms, with the result that very few words in Modern Standard German have this shift: alongside sanft German also has sacht, both meaning "soft", "gentle".
One consequence of this is that English has very few words ending in -nth; those which do exist must be more recent than the productive period of the Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law:
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stock | retire | vm
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