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English is by far the most-spoken West Germanic language, with more than 1 billion speakers worldwide. 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 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, 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 are a branch of Germanic languages first spoken in Central Europe and the British Isles. The branch has three parts: the North Sea Germanic languages, the Weser-Rhine Germanic languages, and the Elbe Germanic languages.
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.
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.
William G. Moulton Anthony F. Buccini. 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).
