Germanic (language)
| Germanic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution |
Principally northern, western and central Europe, the Americas (Anglo-America, Caribbean Netherlands and Suriname), Southern Africa and Oceania |
| Linguistic classification |
Indo-European
|
| Proto-language | Proto-Germanic |
| Subdivisions |
|
| ISO 639-2 / 5 | |
| Linguasphere | 52- (phylozone) |
| Glottolog | germ1287 |
Countries where a Germanic language is the first language of the majority of the population
Countries where a Germanic language is an official but not primary language
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The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 500 million people mainly in North America, Oceania, Southern Africa and Europe.
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 and Dutch with 23 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers, Low German with roughly 6.7 million native speakers (considered a separate collection of dialects, 5 million in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands);Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe and Scots, both with 1.5 million native speakers. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border. The Frisian languages have over 0.5 million native speakers.
The main North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers.
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Wikipedia