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Folk
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English Folk "people" is derived from a Germanic noun *fulka meaning "people" or "army" (i.e. a crowd as opposed to "a people" in a more abstract sense of clan or tribe). The English word folk has cognates in most of the other Germanic languages.
Folk may be a Germanic root that is unique to the Germanic languages. although Latin vulgus, "the common people", has been suggested as a possible cognate.
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Encyclopedia
English Folk "people" is derived from a Germanic noun *fulka meaning "people" or "army" (i.e. a crowd as opposed to "a people" in a more abstract sense of clan or tribe). The English word folk has cognates in most of the other Germanic languages.
Folk may be a Germanic root that is unique to the Germanic languages. although Latin vulgus, "the common people", has been suggested as a possible cognate.
Etymology
The Modern English word "folk", derives from Old English "folc" meaning "common people", "men", "tribe" or "multitude". The Old English noun itself came from Proto-Germanic "*fulka" which perhaps originally referred to a "host of warriors". Compare Old Norse "folk" meaning "people" but more so "army" or "detachment", German "Gefolge" (host), and Lithuanian "pulkas" meaning "crowd". The latter is considered to be an early Lithuanian loanword from Germanic origin, cf. Belarusian "????" - "polk" meaning regiment and German "Pulk" for a group of persons standing together.
The word became colloquialized (usually in the plural "folks") in English in the sense "people", and was considered unelegant by the beginning of the 19th century. It re-entered academic English through the invention of the word folklore in 1846 by the antiquarian William J. Thoms (1803-85) as an Anglo-Saxonism. This word revived folk in a modern sense of "of the common people, whose culture is handed down orally", and opened up a flood of compound formations, eg. folk art (1921), folk-hero (1899), folk-medicine (1898), folk-tale (1891), folk-song (1847), folk-dance (1912). Folk-music is from 1889; in reference to the branch of modern popular music (originally associated with Greenwich Village in New York City) it dates from 1958. It is also regional music.
Cognates in other Germanic language
Folk has a cognate in almost every other Germanic language, all deriving from Proto-Germanic "*fulka", some are listed below:
In all Germanic languages, the variant of "folk" means "people" or something related to the people.
Volk in German
Background
In German the word Volk can have several different meanings, such as folk (simple people), people in the ethnic sense, and nation.
German Volk is commonly used as the first, determing part (head) of compound nouns such as Volksentscheid (plebiscite, lit. "decision of/by the people") or Völkerbund (League of Nations), or the car manufacturer Volkswagen (literally, "people's car").
19th century and early 20th century
A number of völkisch movements existed prior to World War I. Combining interest in folklore, ecology, occultism and romanticism with ethnic nationalism, their ideologies were a strong influence on the Nazi party, which itself was inspired by Adolf Hitler's membership of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party), even though Hitler in Mein Kampf himself denounced usage of the word völkisch as he considered it too vague as to carry any recognizable meaning due to former over-use. Today, the term völkisch is largely restricted to historical contexts describing the closing 19th century and early 20th century up to Hitler's seize of power in 1933, especially during the years of the Weimar Republic.
Nazi era
During the years of the Third Reich, the term Volk became heavily used in nationalistic political slogans, particularly in slogans such as Volk ohne Raum — "(a) people without space" or Völkischer Beobachter ("popular observer"), an NSDAP party newspaper. Also the political slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer ("One people, one country/empire, one leader"); and the compound word Herrenvolk, translated as "master race".
Even though Hitler in his book Mein Kampf often mixed up specific biological and zoological terms such as race, species, and others, the Nazi-era use of Volk could not, depending on context, be interpreted as "race", "Germanic", or "European." In Nazi propaganda, several peoples made up a race, so these two terms did not denote the same thing during the Nazi years. The German people was considered part of the Germanic race which latter officially included the Scandinavians, the English, and the Dutch as well (while Hitler himself also included the Celts), so Volk did not equal Germanic either. Nazi-era publications on pre-history only differed whether their Germanic race equalled the Indo-European race or the Germanic race itself was part of a family of Indo-European races, since indogermanisch is the common German term for Indo-European.
Today
Because Volk is the generic German word for "people" in the ethnic sense today as well as for "people entitled to vote" (Wahlvolk), its use does not necessarily denote any particular political views in post-1945 Germany. However, because of its past, the word is rarely used with Bevölkerung ("population") serving as a substitute.
See also
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