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All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic, ... New York: Modern Language Association of America. Wright, Joseph C. (1919).
East Central German. Thuringian. Upper Saxon. North Upper Saxon–South Markish. Silesian. Halcnovian. Wymysorys(with a significant influence from Low Saxon, Dutch, Polish, and Scots) High Prussian. Yiddish(with a significant influx of vocabulary from Hebrewand other languages, and traditionally written in the Hebrew alphabet)
The United States does not have an official language at the federal level, but the most commonly used language is English (specifically, American English), which is the de facto national language. In addition, 32 U.S. states out of 50 and all five U.S. territories have declared English as an official language.
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 language family also includes Afrikaans ...
All Germanic languages derive from the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), which is generally thought to have been spoken between 4500 and 2500 BCE. [67] The ancestor of Germanic languages is referred to as Proto- or Common Germanic, [68] and likely represented a group of mutually intelligible dialects. [69]
This list contains Germanic elements of the English language which have a close corresponding Latinate form. The correspondence is semantic—in most cases these words are not cognates, but in some cases they are doublets, i.e., ultimately derived from the same root, generally Proto-Indo-European, as in cow and beef, both ultimately from PIE *gʷōus.
Mayan languages are spoken by at least six million Indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras. In 1996, Guatemala formally recognized 21 Mayan languages by name, and Mexico recognizes eight more. The Mayan language family is one of the best documented and most studied in the Americas.
An early process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees was metaphony (vowel mutation), conceptually similar to the umlaut process so characteristic of the Germanic languages. Depending on the language, certain stressed vowels were raised (or sometimes diphthongized) either by a final /i/ or /u/ or by a directly following /j/.