Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages. By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South (the Walliser dialect being the southernmost surviving German dialect) to Northern Low Saxon in the North.
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
The Germanic languages include some 58 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects that originated in Europe; this language family is part of the Indo-European language family. Each subfamily in this list contains subgroups and individual languages. The standard division of Germanic is into three branches: East Germanic languages; North Germanic ...
German is the official language of six countries, all of which lie in central and western Europe. These countries (with the addition of South Tyrol of Italy) also form the Council for German Orthography and are referred to as the German Sprachraum (German language area).
The Frisian languages (/ ˈ f r iː ʒ ə n / FREE-zhən [1] or / ˈ f r ɪ z i ə n / FRIZ-ee-ən [2]) are a closely related group of West Germanic languages, spoken by about 400,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
The official language of Germany is German, [2] with over 95 percent of the country speaking Standard German or a dialect of German as their first language. [3] This figure includes speakers of Northern Low Saxon, a recognized minority or regional language that is not considered separately from Standard German in statistics.
This is a list of European languages by the number of native speakers in Europe only. List. Rank ... Low German (Low Saxon) 1,000,000 [57] 2,600,000 [57] Kazakh:
Today German, together with French, is a common second foreign language in the western world, with English well established as a first foreign language. [ 5 ] [ 15 ] German ranks second (after English) among the best known foreign languages in the EU (on a par with French) [ 5 ] as well as in Russia . [ 16 ]