The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages spoken natively by about 515 million people throughout Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa.
Western[]
The West Germanic languages include:
- English, with 360–400 million native speakers.[1]
- German, with over 100 million native speakers.[2]
- Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 0.3 million native speakers and assuming 6.7—10 million people who can understand it.[3][4] (5 million in Germany[3] and 1.7 million in the Netherlands).[5]
- Dutch, with 23 million native speakers.
- Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers.[6]
- Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe.[7]
- Scots, both with 1.5 million native speakers.
- Limburgish varieties with roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border.
- Wikipedia: Frisian languages with over 0.5 million native speakers in the Netherlands and Germany.
Northern[]
The main North Germanic languages, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers, are:
Eastern[]
The East Germanic languages, all of which are now extinct, included:
- Gothic
- Burgundian
- Vandalic
- Crimean Gothic, spoken until the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.[8]
References[]
- ↑ Världens 100 största språk 2010 (sv). Template:WpNationalencyklopedin (2010). Retrieved on 12 February 2014.
- ↑ SIL Ethnologue (2006). 95 million speakers of Standard German; 105 million including Middle and Upper German dialects; 120 million including Low Saxon and Yiddish.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Gechattet wird auf Plattdeusch. Noz.de. Retrieved on 2014-03-14.
- ↑ Saxon, Low Ethnologue.
- ↑ The Other Languages of Europe: Demographic, Sociolinguistic, and Educational Perspectives by Guus Extra, Durk Gorter; Multilingual Matters, 2001 – 454; page 10.
- ↑ Afrikaans.
- ↑ Dovid Katz. YIDDISH. YIVO. Archived from the original on March 22, 2012. Retrieved on 20 December 2015.
- ↑ 1 Cor. 13:1-12.