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The North Germanic languages are national languages in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, whereas the non-Germanic Finnish is spoken by the majority in Finland. In inter-Nordic contexts, texts are today often presented in three versions: Finnish, Icelandic, and one of the three languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. [18]
The largest North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, which are in part mutually intelligible and have a combined total of about 20 million native speakers in the Nordic countries and an additional five million second language speakers; since the Middle Ages, however, these languages have been strongly influenced by Middle Low ...
North Germanic peoples, Nordic peoples and in a medieval context Norsemen, were a Germanic linguistic group originating from the Scandinavian Peninsula. They are identified by their cultural similarities, common ancestry and common use of the Proto-Norse language from around 200 AD, a language that around 800 AD became the Old Norse language ...
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.
Today Old Norse has developed into the modern North Germanic languages Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and other North Germanic varieties of which Norwegian, Danish and Swedish retain considerable mutual intelligibility while Icelandic remains the closest to Old Norse.
Each subfamily in this list contains subgroups and individual languages. The standard division of Germanic is into three branches: East Germanic languages; North Germanic languages; West Germanic languages; They all descend from Proto-Germanic, and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European.
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages.
