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The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
- West Germanic Languages
The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into...
- List of Germanic Languages
The Germanic languages include some 58 (SIL estimate)...
- East Germanic Languages
The East Germanic languages, also called the Oder-Vistula...
- Limburgish
A Limburgish speaker, recorded in Slovakia. Limburgish...
- List of Languages by Total Number of Speakers
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases...
- German Language
Germanic languages. in contemporary Europe. German is an...
- North Germanic languages
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three...
- West Germanic Languages
The Germanic languages include some 58 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects that originated in Europe; this language family is part of the Indo-European language family. Each subfamily in this list contains subgroups and individual languages. The standard division of Germanic is into three branches: East Germanic languages; North Germanic ...
The Germanic languages are a group of Indo-European languages. They came from one language, Proto-Germanic, which was first spoken in Scandinavia in the Iron Age. Today, the Germanic languages are spoken by around 515 million people as a first language. English is the most spoken Germanic language, with 360-400 million native speakers.
Germanic languages. in contemporary Europe. German is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. The Germanic languages are traditionally subdivided into three branches: North Germanic, East Germanic, and West Germanic.
- History
- Family Tree
- Comparison of Phonological and Morphological Features
- Phonology
- Morphology
- West Germanic Vocabulary
- Bibliography
Origins and characteristics
The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. In some cases, their exact relation was difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, so that some individual varieties have been difficult to classify. This is especially true for the unattested Jutish language; today, most scholars classify Jutish as a West Germanic variety with several features of North Germanic. Until the late 20th century, some scholars claimed that...
Validity of West Germanic as a subgroup
Since at least the early 20th century, a number of morphological, phonological, and lexical archaisms and innovations have been identified as specifically West Germanic. Since then, individual Proto-West Germanic lexemes have also been reconstructed. Yet, there was a long dispute if these West Germanic characteristics had to be explained with the existence of a West Germanic proto-language or rather with Sprachbund effects. Hans Frede Nielsen's 1981 study Old English and the Continental Germa...
The reconstruction of Proto-West-Germanic
Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic morphological paradigms and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West-Germanic morphological forms or lexemes. The first comprehensive reconstruction of the Proto-West-Germanic language was published in 2013 by Wolfram Euler, followed in 2014 by the study of Donald Ringeand Ann Taylor.
Divisions between subfamilies of continental Germanic languages are rarely precisely defined; most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialectsbeing mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.
The following table shows a list of various linguistic features and their extent among the West Germanic languages, organized roughly from northwest to southeast. Some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages. The following table shows some comparisons of consonant development in the respective diale...
The existence of a unified Proto-West-Germanic language is debated. Features which are common to West Germanic languages may be attributed either to common inheritance or to areal effects. The phonological system of the West Germanic branching as reconstructed is mostly similar to that of Proto-Germanic, with some changes in the categorization and ...
Nouns
The noun paradigms of Proto-West Germanic have been reconstructed as follows:
The following table compares a number of Frisian, English, Scots, Yola, Dutch, Limburgish, German and Afrikaans words with common West Germanic (or older) origin. The grammatical gender of each term is noted as masculine (m.), feminine (f.), or neuter (n.) where relevant. Other words, with a variety of origins: Note that some of the shown similarit...
Adamus, Marian (1962). On the mutual relations between Nordic and other Germanic dialects.Germanica Wratislavensia 7. 115–158.Bammesberger, Alfred (1984). Der indogermanische Aorist und das germanische Präteritum [The Indo-European aorist and the Germanic past tense], in: Languages and Cultures. Studies in Honor of Edgar...Bammesberger, Alfred (Ed.) (1991). Old English Runes and their Continental Background.Heidelberg: Winter.Bammesberger, Alfred (1996). The Preterite of Germanic Strong Verbs in Classes Fore and Five, in "North-Western European Language Evolution" 27, 33–43.The East Germanic languages, also called the Oder-Vistula Germanic languages, are a group of extinct Germanic languages that were spoken by East Germanic peoples. East Germanic is one of the primary branches of Germanic languages, along with North Germanic and West Germanic.
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages —a sub-family of the Indo-European languages —along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages.
