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In english there are two ways to express a present action:
I go
I am going
However, In German there is really only one way to express a present action:
Ich gehe
If English is a Germanic language, why does English have the present continuous ("I am walking") while German does not?
In linguistics, “why” is usually a bad question. Actually, in several Indo-European languages the old present tense has died out completely and been replaced by the present participle plus copula. This has happened in Hindi and other North Indian languages. There are similar things in other language families, e.g. in Aramaic. English seems to have gone halfway in this direction: the inherited present tense and the participle+copula exist side by side, but they have been differentiated semantically.
Actually, German has even more ways to express progressive aspect:
Ich bin am Gehen (am-Progressiv, it becomes more and more accepted)
Ich bin beim Gehen (competitor to am-Progressiv)
Ich bin im Gehen (very limited as it cannot be used for every verb and context. "im Gehen" means that you're about to go (ie. when someone calls you as you are about to leave))
Ich bin dabei zu gehen
Ich gehe gerade
The am-Progressiv is regarded to be highly grammaticalized with the least restrictions while dabei/gerade work more on a lexical level.
The difference is that German is in general far more lenient on which tense, aspect etc. you have to use. Therefore, progressive aspect is not as obvious in German as it is in English.
As Veredomon already explained, German does have ways to express the progressive aspect, and even more than one. The real difference is that English, like the Celtic languages, has the unusual feature that marking the progressive aspect is not optional. Here is why it makes sense that German hasn't developed obligatory progressive marking (yet?).
Many languages develop a way to express the progressive aspect because often you want to stress that something is going on right now. Once there is an established way of expressing that, people tend to generalise it further and further for much the same reason that people say brilliant or tremendous instead of just plain good. Example: "I promise I will pay tomorrow. I am not just promising it, the paying tomorrow is such an irrevocable fact that one could say I am practically paying right now. (Though of course I can't because I can't access my money yet.) You could say I am paying, though not right now but tomorrow. That's it: I am paying tomorrow!"
Among other ways of marking the progressive aspect, German and Dutch have a construction that is similar to one that may be the origin of the English progressive as there are some similar examples in Old English. (Old English didn't have a progressive like modern English does, but a few sentences have survived that look suspiciously like the Dutch/English progressive. I can't find the source right now, but I think one example was, in literal translation, "[be] on the hunting".)
So literally, in Dutch and German you say "I am at the cooking". Even for the literal translation I used the gerund/present participle in English instead of the Dutch/German infinitive because in each case that's how the language forms nouns from verbs.
The Dutch and German constructions are a bit wordy, but straightforward enough. I believe the main thing that prevents them from being used so often that they become obligatory where applicable is that they don't generalise well to more complicated cases:
This is where it gets weird, because literally, in Dutch and German you say "I am the food at the cooking". (Since het eten / das Essen is literally the eating, we could even translate this as "I am the eating at the cooking".) In Dutch this is already firmly established. In German it's definitely colloquial, and even when it is used colloquially, it indicates that the speaker comes from the Ruhr district, a large and populous area near the Dutch border.
It's unlikely that the progressive will become obligatory in Dutch and German before it is simplified a lot. There is already a construction that is structurally essentially the same as the English progressive:
If we consider cases such as "I am skiing" / "I am someplace to ski" or "I am hunting" / "I am someplace to hunt", it appears that semantically this second construction is close enough to the progressive that it might acquire a progressive meaning. But for now the two are held separate, and the simple construction is currently blocking the simplification of the progressive by simply dropping aan het / am. I.e. you can't simplify the progressive that way because if you do you are not extending a language so as to make new sequences of words grammatical, but you are saying something that already has a different meaning. By the way, this construction may well be at the origin of the strange object placement in the Dutch (and dialectal German) progressive:
Now that this parallelism exists, it is natural to interpret aan het / am as a progressive marker. Which interpretation of course makes it even less likely to be dropped when expressing a progressive.
Due to these problems, the most common way of expressing the progressive aspect in Dutch and German is still by adding adverbs such as nu / gerade (right now):
This way of marking the progressive aspect is very unlikely to become obligatory because (to my knowledge) there is no precedent of obligatory adverbs in Germanic languages.
This might be of interest: Early Contect between Celtic and English (https://www.uni-due.de/IERC/early_contact.htm(
"The concern of the present section is with the development of the progressive form in English. There are basically three views on this (Filppula 2002b): (i) it was an independent development in English (Curme 1912, Nickel 1966, Visser 1963-73, Mitchell 1985), (ii) it arose under the influence of Latin, perhaps via French (Mossé 1938), and (iii) it results from contact with Celtic (Keller 1925, Dal 1952, Preußler 1956, Wagner 1959, Braaten 1967, Ó Corráin 1997).
"As has been pointed out by many authors previously (see Mittendorf and Poppe 2000: 119) a type of progressive structure in which a gerund was governed by a preposition existed in Old English: ic wæs on huntunge ‘I was hunting’ (Braaten 1967: 173). This type of structure is also found in vernacular German, with an infinitive, as in Ich bin am Schreiben [I am at write-INFINITIVE] ‘I am writing’.
"In this context a further consideration is necessary which Mittendorf and Poppe deal with in their examination of the progressive (2000: 120-2). This is the typological perspective. As noted by other scholars such as Comrie (1976: 98) and Bybee and Dahl (1989: 77) progressive aspect is frequently expressed — in many unrelated languages (Mittendorf and Poppe, loc. cit.) — by means of a locative structure meaning to be ‘at’ and ‘in’ an activity. Furthermore, the step from structures like ic wæs on huntunge to I was hunting is small, involving only the deletion of the preposition. The fully developed progressive form appears in Middle English, but the apparent time delay between the contact with Celtic in the Old English period and the surfacing of the progressive later can be accounted for by the strong tradition of the written standard in Old English and should not be given as an argument against Celtic influence as some authors are inclined to do, see Nickel (1966: 300), for instance, and Dal (1952: 113) who rightly explains the time gap.
"The progressive is found in all Celtic languages and is clearly represented by the Irish structure ag + verbal noun as in Tá mé ag caint léi, lit. ‘is me at talking with-her’. This in itself is a good example of a locative expression for the progressive aspect and is typologically parallel to the Old English ic wæs on huntunge.
"In summary one can say here that in both Old English and Celtic one had a progressive aspect, realised by means of a locative expression and with a similar functional range (Mittendorf and Poppe 2000: 139). Both languages maintained this aspect and English lost the locative preposition and increased the syntactic flexibility and range of the structure, perhaps under the supportive influence of contact with Celtic."
That English may have borrowed this from Old French's use (before 17th Century) of the gerondif, e.g. est parlant, after being influenced by Celtic, only to have modern French in the 17th Century discard it by the authoritative grammarian Malherbe's ruling it to be 'rustique' could explain both English's having the progressive based on tense forms of the copula 'to be' + imperfect participle (present participle) and French's now having lost it.
German just continues the ancestral state. It shares that with the Scandinavian languages.There is little to explain there. German has a competing system with adverbs like "gerade", "weiter" and "los", which allow you to express such things but are facultative. Hence there is no pressing need for speakers to develop more means of expressing it.
