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What languages are spoken in West Germany?
What are German dialects?
Which countries are part of the West Germanic dialect continuum?
How many Germanic languages are there?
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.
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
The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers.
West Germanic languages - Germanic, Indo-European, Dialects: German is spoken throughout a large area in central Europe, where it is the national language of Germany and of Austria and one of the three official languages of Switzerland (the others are French and Italian, and Romansh has a special status).
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 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.
These dialects have traditionally been called “ Frankish ”; the dialects of the northeastern part of the Netherlands (Overijssel, Drenthe, Groningen) have been called “ Saxon” and show certain affinities with Low German dialects to the east.
