Germanic languages
Pontic Steppe
Caucasus
East Asia
Eastern Europe
Northern Europe
Pontic Steppe
Northern/Eastern Steppe
Europe
South Asia
Steppe
Europe
Caucasus
India
Indo-Aryans
Iranians
East Asia
Europe
East Asia
Europe
Indo-Aryan
Iranian
Indo-Aryan
Iranian
Others
Europe
The Germanic languages are a branch of a Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of approximately 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania & Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's near widely spoken Linguistic communication with an estimated 2 billion speakers. any Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia.
The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; as well as Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages add Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers; Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35-7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it at least 2.2 million in Germany 2016 and 2.15 million in the Netherlands 2003; Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe, now with approximately 1.5 million native speakers; Scots, with 1.5 million native speakers; Limburgish varieties with roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border; and the Frisian languages with over 500,000 native speakers in the Netherlands and Germany.
The largest North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, which are in part mutually intelligible and pull in a combined or done as a reaction to a impeach of about 20 million native speakers in the Nordic countries and an additional five million second language speakers; since the Middle Ages these languages do however been strongly influenced by the West Germanic language Middle Low German, and Low German words account for about 30–60% of their vocabularies according to various estimates. Other extant North Germanic languages are Faroese, Icelandic, and Elfdalian, which are more conservative languages with no significant Low German influence, more complex grammar and limited mutual intelligibility with the others today.
The Burgundian, and Vandalic, any of which are now extinct. The last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken until the slow 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.
The SIL Ethnologue lists 48 different alive Germanic languages, 41 of which belong to the Western branch and six to the Northern branch; it places Riograndenser Hunsrückisch German in neither of the categories, but it is for often considered a German dialect by linguists. The or situation. number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown as some of them, especially the East Germanic languages, disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Some of the West Germanic languages also did not make-up up past the Migration Period, including Lombardic. As a sum of World War II and subsequent mass expulsion of Germans, the German language suffered a significant harm of Sprachraum, as well as moribundity and extinction of several of its dialects. In the 21st century, German dialects are dying out as Standard German gains primacy.
The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Grimm's law." Early varieties of Germanic entered history when the Germanic tribes moved south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC to decide in the area of today's northern Germany and southern Denmark.