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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
English is by far the most-spoken West Germanic language,...
- 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
German ( Standard High German: Deutsch, pronounced [dɔʏtʃ]...
- West Germanic Languages
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. The Germanic languages are the East Germanic languages (all extinct), the North Germanic languages, and the West Germanic languages.
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- Proto-Germanic
- Indo-EuropeanGermanic
- Overview
- Linguistic characteristics of the protolanguage
Germanic languages, branch of the Indo-European language family. Scholars often divide the Germanic languages into three groups: West Germanic, including English, German, and Netherlandic (Dutch); North Germanic, including Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese; and East Germanic, now extinct, comprising only Gothic and the languages of the Vandals, Burgundians, and a few other tribes.
In numbers of native speakers, English, with 450 million, clearly ranks third among the languages of the world (after Mandarin and Spanish); German, with some 98 million, probably ranks 10th (after Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese). To these figures may be added those for persons with another native language who have learned one of the Germanic languages for commercial, scientific, literary, or other purposes. English is unquestionably the world’s most widely used second language.
The earliest historical evidence for Germanic is provided by isolated words and names recorded by Latin authors beginning in the 1st century bce. From approximately 200 ce there are inscriptions carved in the 24-letter runic alphabet. The earliest extensive Germanic text is the (incomplete) Gothic Bible, translated about 350 ce by the Visigothic bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila) and written in a 27-letter alphabet of the translator’s own design. Later versions of the runic alphabet were used sparingly in England and Germany but more widely in Scandinavia—in the latter area down to early modern times. All extensive later Germanic texts, however, use adaptations of the Latin alphabet.
See table for the names and approximate dates of the earliest recorded Germanic languages.
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Languages & Alphabets
The special characteristics of the Germanic languages that distinguish them from other Indo-European languages result from numerous phonological and grammatical changes.
German (German: Deutsch) is a West Germanic language. It is spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg; natively by around 100 million people. It is the most widely spoken mother tongue in the first language. There are some people who speak German in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Northern Italy.
