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Cite. Summary. The continental West Germanic dialect continuum roughly encompasses the territory of modern-day Germany, Austria, the German-speaking part of Switzerland, the Netherlands, the northern half of Belgium (Flanders), Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and South Tyrol, in northern Italy.
Within Europe, the three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct variety of West Germanic. The language family also includes Afrikaans, Yiddish, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, and Scots. Additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based ...
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Continental West Germanic continuum. Historically, the Dutch, Frisian, Low Saxon and High German dialects formed a canonical dialect continuum, which has been gradually falling apart since the Late Middle Ages due to the pressures of modern education, standard languages, migration and weakening knowledge of the dialects.
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.
However, all German dialects belong to the dialect continuum of High German and Low German. In the past (roughly until the end of World War II), there was a dialect continuum of all Continental West Germanic languages, as nearly any pair of contiguous dialects were perfectly mutually intelligible.
The Low West-Germanic dialect group includes Lower Franconian, Lower Saxon, East-and Westphalian, Brandenburgish, and Mecklenburgish. The official language of Germany and Austria, called High German, is based on High and Central West-Germanic dialects.
The spread of early loans from Latin throughout all Germanic languages indicates that, at the time of their borrowing, a continuum of mutually intelligible dialects must still have existed, though differences between widely separated points in the continuum may have been significant.
