West Germanic languages

North Germanic languages

The West Germanic languages cost the largest of a three branches of the Germanic shape of languages the others being the North Germanic & the extinct East Germanic languages.

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, in addition to Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct classification of West Germanic. The language family also includes Afrikaans, Yiddish, Luxembourgish, and Scots, which are closely related to Dutch, German and English respectively. Additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch, English, or German.

Family tree

Note that divisions between subfamilies of continental Germanic languages are rarely precisely defined; most work dialect continua, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.