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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. [1] English is the most spoken Germanic language, with 360-400 million native speakers. [2]
The Germanic peoples shared a native script from around the first century or before, the runes, which was gradually replaced with the Latin script, although runes continued to be used for specialized purposes thereafter. Traditionally, the Germanic peoples have been seen as possessing a law dominated by the concepts of feuding and blood ...
Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, French and German each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European ...
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages . Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic, East Germanic and North Germanic. [1]
German ( Standard High German: Deutsch, pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] ⓘ) [10] is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is also an official language of Luxembourg ...
The Frisian languages ( / ˈfriːʒən / FREE-zhən [1] or / ˈfrɪziən / FRIZ-ee-ən [2]) are a closely related group of West Germanic languages, spoken by about 400,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic / ˌɪŋviːˈɒnɪk /, is a group of West Germanic languages that were first spoken in what is now northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. They were also spread to the British Isles in the Migration Period. The languages were Old Frisian, Old English and Old Saxon.
