Germanic languages

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:	North Germanic West Germanic East Germanic (extinct)
ISO 639-5:
Linguasphere:	52- (phylozone)
Glottolog:	germ1287
Countries where the English language is the first language of the majority of the population   Countries where the English language is an official but not primary language   Countries where the Dutch language is the first language of the majority of the population   Countries where the Danish language is the first language of the majority of the population   Countries where the Danish language is an official but not primary language   Countries where the German language is the first language of the majority of the population   Countries where the Norwegian language is the first language of the majority of the population   Countries where the Swedish language is the first language of the majority of the population   Countries where the Swedish 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 approximately 500 million people mainly in North America, Oceania, Southern Africa, and Central, Western and Northern Europe. It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages.

The West Germanic branch includes the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with approximately 360–400 million native speakers,German with over 100 million native speakers, and Dutch with 23 million native speakers. Other major West Germanic languages are 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.