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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 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.
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]
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 ...
The East Germanic languages, also called the Oder-Vistula Germanic languages, are a group of extinct Germanic languages that were spoken by East Germanic peoples. East Germanic is one of the primary branches of Germanic languages, along with North Germanic and West Germanic. The only East Germanic language of which texts are known is Gothic ...
The colloquial speech is a compromise between Standard German and the dialect. [13] Northern Germany (the Low German area) is characterized by a loss of dialects: standard German is the vernacular, with very few regional features even in informal situations. [12] In Central Germany (the Middle German area) there is a tendency towards dialect ...
The East Germanic languages are now extinct, and Gothic is the only language in this branch which survives in written texts. The West Germanic languages, however, have undergone extensive dialectal subdivision and are now represented in modern languages such as English, German, Dutch, Yiddish, Afrikaans, and others. [17]
Germanic culture. Germanic culture is a term referring to the culture of Germanic peoples, and can be used to refer to a range of time periods and nationalities, but is most commonly used in either a historical or contemporary context to denote groups that derive from the Proto-Germanic language, which is generally thought to have emerged as a ...