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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.
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)
Roman bronze statuette dated to the late 1st century – early 2nd century CE, representing a Germanic man with his hair in a Suebian knot. The Germanic peoples were tribal groups who lived in Northern Europe in Classical Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In modern scholarship, they typically include not only the Roman-era Germani who lived ...
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 list of early Germanic peoples is a register of ancient Germanic cultures, tribal groups, and other alliances of Germanic tribes and civilisations in ancient times. This information comes from various ancient historical documents, beginning in the 2nd century BC and extending into late antiquity .
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 ...
Sami languages form an unrelated group that has coexisted with the North Germanic language group in Scandinavia since prehistory. [19] Sami, like Finnish, is part of the group of the Uralic languages. [20] During centuries of interaction, Finnish and Sami have imported many more loanwords from North Germanic languages than vice versa.
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic, East Germanic and North Germanic. [ 1 ]