Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are languages spoken by the Germanic peoples. They are Indo-European languages.
Contents
History
- "In the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, Germanic tribes lived in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. Their expansions and migrations from the 2nd century BCE onward are largely recorded in history. The oldest Germanic language of which much is known is the Gothic of the 4th century CE. Other languages include English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic."[1]
The Germanic Languages
- You might have heard about language families before, and today we’ll be talking about Germanic languages. When we say Germanic languages, we’re referring to all of the languages that were once part of the language ancestor Proto-Germanic. Linguists believe this language was spoken between ca. 500 BCE until around the 5th century CE, when it began to split into different branches [...]. Besides the obvious answer, German, there are at least 47 living Germanic languages around today. Most linguists talk about this language family in terms of three branches: the Northern, Eastern and Western Germanic languages. From these three branches, we can group all the Germanic languages we know today. The Northern Germanic languages (also known as Scandinavian or Nordic languages) include Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. This whole branch descended from Old Norse, and still enjoys quite a bit of mutual intelligibility between the languages today. The Western Germanic languages include German, English, Dutch, Frisian, Pennsylvania Dutch, Luxembourgish, Yiddish and Afrikaans, along with a variety of disparate languages that often get lumped together as German or Dutch dialects. Unfortunately, all of the Eastern Germanic languages went extinct starting in the 4th century, and the last living language of this branch died in the late 18th century. Around 515 million people speak a Germanic language natively, with English accounting for around 360 million speakers. The next biggest language of the group is German [...]. However, if we include the number of second-language speakers, then the number jumps up to around 2 billion speakers. While quite a few people still believe that all Germanic languages evolved from different German dialects, it would be more accurate to say that they are all linguistic siblings. In this case, German isn’t the parent language, but just another offspring of Proto-Germanic.[2]
West Germanic Languages
This is the largest branch by number of speakers and diversity:
- English (≈360–400 million native speakers worldwide)
- German (≈90–100 million; includes Standard High German and regional varieties)
- Dutch (≈24 million)
- Afrikaans (≈7–11 million, mainly in South Africa and Namibia; derived from Dutch)
- Yiddish (≈1–1.5 million, primarily among German Jewish communities; historically derived from Middle High German)
- Frisian (West Frisian ≈450,000–500,000 in the Netherlands; North Frisian and Saterland Frisian smaller)
- Scots (≈1–1.5 million in Scotland; sometimes classified as a distinct language or close relative of English)
- Luxembourgish (≈300,000–400,000 in Luxembourg)
- Low German (Plattdeutsch; ≈2–5 million active speakers, mainly in northern Germany and parts of the Netherlands; often considered a dialect group but recognized separately by some)
Other notable or minority West Germanic varieties include Pennsylvania German (Amish communities), Limburgish, and various Alemannic/Bavarian dialects within German, but these are typically grouped under the major languages above.
These descend from Old Norse and are spoken primarily in the Nordic countries. They include:
- Swedish (≈9–10 million native speakers)
- Danish (≈6 million)
- Norwegian (≈5 million; includes Bokmål and Nynorsk standards)
- Icelandic (≈320,000–350,000)
- Faroese (≈70,000–90,000)
Note: "Nordic languages" typically refers to this exact group, sometimes excluding Faroese/Icelandic in casual usage but including them linguistically.
External links
Encyclopedias
References
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