Germanic

Germanic may refer to

See also

Germanic languages

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, Central Europe, Western and Northern Europe.

The West Germanic branch includes the two most widely spoken Germanic languages: English, with approximately 360–400 million native speakers, and German, with over 100 million native speakers. Other major West Germanic languages are Dutch with 23 million speakers,Low German with approximately 5 million in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands, and Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.2 million.

The main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers.

The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, all of which are now extinct. The last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.

The SIL Ethnologue lists 48 different living Germanic languages, of which 42 belong to the Western branch, and 6 to the Northern branch. The total number of Germanic languages through history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or shortly after the Migration Period.