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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.
West Germanic languages, group of Germanic languages that developed in the region of the North Sea, Rhine-Weser, and Elbe. Out of the many local West Germanic dialects the following six modern standard languages have arisen: English, Frisian, Dutch (Netherlandic-Flemish), Afrikaans, German, and Yiddish. English
Like every language spoken over a considerable geographic area, Proto-Germanic presumably consisted of a number of geographic varieties or dialects that over time developed in different ways into the different early and modern Germanic languages. Late-19th-century scholars used a family tree diagram to show this splitting into dialects and the ...
10.1 Introduction. Germanic languages are spoken by about 500 million native speakers. They constitute a medium-large subgroup of the Indo-European language family and were originally located in Northern Europe, owing much of their current distribution to the recent expansion of English.
All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia and Germany. The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa.
There are around 520 million people who speak a Germanic language as their first language, and another two billion people speak one as a second language. Even though each Germanic language can seem quite different, they all have a common ancestor in the Proto-Germanic language tree.
Germanic Languages Click on a language area to see each language's description, or choose from the list below. Germanic languages: Eastern: Western: Northern: Gothic* Old High German* Old Scandinavian (Old Norse)* Other East Germanic Dialects* Old Low German (Old Saxon)* Danish
