Germanic Languages

Germanic Languages, subfamily of the Indo-European languages. Germanic languages are spoken by more than 480 million people in northern and western Europe, North America, South Africa, and Australia. In their structure and evolution they fall into three branches:

• 1. East Germanic (extinct): the Gothic language and some other extinct languages. Substantial information survives only for Gothic.
• 2. North Germanic or Scandinavian: western group—the Icelandic language, the Norwegian language, and Faroese (intermediate between Icelandic and western Norwegian dialects); eastern group—the Danish language and the Swedish language.
• 3. West Germanic: Anglo-Frisian group—the English language and the Frisian language (See also American English); Netherlandic-German group—Netherlandic, or Dutch-Flemish (see Dutch Language; Flemish Language) and the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects, Afrikaans, the German language or High German, and the Yiddish language.

In terms of unwritten regional dialects, the Scandinavian languages form a single speech area of high mutual intelligibility (except for Icelandic, which was long isolated and retains many archaisms), within which Danish has diverged the most. The Netherlandic-German dialects form another speech area. In both areas, speech varies gradually from one village to the next, although over wide distances greater differences accumulate. Also, in both areas more than one literary norm arose, corresponding to political and historical divisions. These norms are what are usually meant by terms such as Swedish language. See Grimm's Law; Runes; Verner's Law.