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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
Throughout the history of the German language in the United States, through the coexistence with English, there are many loanwords which have been absorbed into the American variety of German. There are also many usages which have been preserved in American German varieties including usages from the numerous dialects of the German regions.
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. [18]
Relatively few place names in the United States have names of German origin, unlike Spanish or French names. Many of the German town names are in the Midwest, due to high German settlement in the 1800s. Many of the names in New York and Pennsylvania originated with the German Palatines (called Pennsylvania Dutch), who immigrated in the 18th ...
The Germanic substrate hypothesis attempts to explain the purportedly distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European languages.Based on the elements of Common Germanic vocabulary and syntax which do not seem to have cognates in other Indo-European languages, it claims that Proto-Germanic may have been either a creole or a contact language that subsumed a ...
The Germans from Russia settled in tight-knit communities, which retained their German language and culture. They raised large families, built German-style churches, buried their dead in distinctive cemeteries by using wrought iron grave markers, [13] and created choir groups that sang German church hymns. Many farmers specialized in the ...
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 ...
The etymology of the Latin word Germani, from which Latin Germania and English Germanic are derived, is unknown, although several proposals have been put forward. Even the language from which it derives is a subject of dispute, with proposals of Germanic, Celtic, and Latin, and Illyrian origins. [10]