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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.
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. [9]
Man speaking German. German (German: Deutsch, pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] ⓘ) [ 10 ] is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the most spoken native language within the European Union. It is the most widely spoken and official (or co-official) language in Germany, Austria ...
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 ]
The Middle Low German language is an ancestor of the modern Low German. It was spoken from about 1100 to 1500, splitting into West Low German and East Low German. The neighbour languages within the dialect continuum of the West Germanic languages were Middle Dutch in the West and Middle High German in the South, later substituted by Early New ...
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 Franco-German friendship became the basis for the political integration of Western Europe in the European Union. In 1998–1999, Germany was one of the founding countries of the eurozone. Germany remains one of the economic powerhouses of Europe, contributing about 1/4 of the eurozone's annual gross domestic product.
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 ...