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The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
German ( Standard High German: Deutsch, pronounced [dɔʏ̯t͡ʃ] ⓘ) [10] is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol.
The Germanic languages include some 58 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects that originated in Europe; this language family is part of the Indo-European language family. Each subfamily in this list contains subgroups and individual languages. The standard division of Germanic is into three branches: East Germanic languages; North Germanic ...
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, and Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct variety of West Germanic. The language family also includes Afrikaans ...
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages —a sub-family of the Indo-European languages —along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish ...
See Distribution of languages on Earth for greater detail. A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor ...
Roman bronze statuette representing a Germanic man with his hair in a Suebian knot. Dating to the late 1st century – early 2nd century A.D. The Germanic peoples were tribal groups who once occupied Northwestern and Central Europe and Scandinavia during antiquity and into the early Middle Ages. Since the 19th century, they have traditionally ...
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages . Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic, East Germanic and North Germanic. [1]