East Germanic and West Germanic in contact : n-stem personal names in the Continental runic inscriptions

Of the runic inscriptions written in the 24-character Older Fuþark, those found on the Continent are fewer in number and cover a much smaller time-period than those in Scandinavia. The corpus of material consists of eighty to ninety inscriptions produced between the fifth-seventh centuries (predominantly in the sixth), with find-sites concentrated in the region of the upper Danube and the upper and middle Rhine. The inscriptions are useful to linguists because they provide us with some of our earliest witnesses to the Germanic dialects of this region. In this paper I consider the possibility that they show indications of contact between East and West Germanic dialects in the ethnic and linguistic melting-pot of this region at the frontier of the collapsing Western Roman Empire.