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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
  • Germanic
Proto-language Proto-Germanic
Subdivisions
ISO 639-2 / 5
Linguasphere 52- (phylozone)
Glottolog germ1287
world map showing countries where a Germanic language is the primary or official language
  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

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 DutchBelgianGerman 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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