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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 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 ( Standard High 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 widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol.
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages —a sub-family of the Indo-European languages —along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish ...
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 ...
Language family. A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy.
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 ...
Roman bronze statuette representing a Germanic man with his hair in a Suebian knot. Dating to the late 1st century – early 2nd century A.D. The Germanic peoples were tribal groups who lived in the north of Europe in Classical Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In modern scholarship, they typically include not only the Roman-era Germani who ...