I’ve often noticed that German speakers have this surprised, curious facial expression when they see Dutch words written out. Let’s start by taking a look at two of the biggest members of this branch: German and Dutch. So how does this look today? We’ve already spent a whole article delving into the Scandinavian languages, but to what degree can we compare the similarities and differences between the Western Germanic languages? Let’s have a closer look at German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and the other living languages from this branch. In this case, German isn’t the parent language, but just another offspring of Proto-Germanic. While quite a few people still believe that all Germanic languages evolved from different German dialects, it would be more accurate to say that they are all linguistic siblings.

Did All Germanic Languages Evolve From German? However, if we include the number of second-language speakers, then the number jumps up to around 2 billion speakers (mostly, again, from English). (The next biggest language of the group is German with approximately 76 million native speakers.) How Many People Speak Germanic Languages?Īround 515 million people speak a Germanic language natively, with English accounting for around 360 million speakers. Unfortunately, all of the Eastern Germanic languages went extinct starting in the 4th century, and the last living language of this branch died in the late 18th century. The Western Germanic languages include German, English, Dutch, Frisian, Pennsylvania Dutch, Luxembourgish, Yiddish and Afrikaans, along with a variety of disparate languages that often get lumped together as German or Dutch dialects. This whole branch descended from Old Norse, and still enjoys quite a bit of mutual intelligibility between the languages today. The Northern Germanic languages (also known as Scandinavian or Nordic languages) include Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. From these three branches, we can group all the Germanic languages we know today. Which Languages Are Members Of The Germanic Family?īesides the obvious answer, German, there are at least 47 living Germanic languages around today. Most linguists talk about this language family in terms of three branches: the Northern, Eastern and Western Germanic languages. So which languages are in this family, and how do they compare to each other today? Let’s have a look.

500 BCE until around the 5th century CE, when it began to split into different branches (more on these branches in a minute). Linguists believe this language was spoken between ca. When we say Germanic languages, we’re referring to all of the languages that were once part of the language ancestor Proto-Germanic. You might have heard about language families before, and today we’ll be talking about Germanic languages.

German and english