Referat Theme: General Information about The Germanic Languages Done by : Annakulova Gulayim

How Many People Speak Germanic Languages
Around 515 million people speak a Germanic language natively, with English accounting for around 360 million speakers. (The next biggest language of the group is German with approximately 76 million native speakers.)
However, if we include the number of second-language speakers, then the
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number jumps up to around 2 billion speakers (mostly, again, from English).

Did All Germanic Languages Evolve From German
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. In this case, German isn’t the parent language, but just another offspring of Proto-Germanic. This is why they seem so similar!
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.
How Similar Are Germanic Languages?
Let’s start by taking a look at two of the biggest members of this branch: German and Dutch. I’ve often noticed that German speakers have this surprised, curious facial expression when they see Dutch words written out. That’s because, for German speakers, many words in Dutch look like incorrectly-spelled German words. For example, the German word finden (to find) is spelled vinden in Dutch. Or the German word Antwort (answer) is spelled antwoord in Dutch. Here are a couple other cognates (along with their English equivalents
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But what about the other Western Germanic languages? As in all language families, the different languages often share common root words. Here are some prominent example

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German language, German Deutsch, official language of both Germany and Austria and one of the official languages of Switzerland. German belongs to the West Germanic group of the Indo-European language family, along with English, Frisian, and Dutch (Netherlandic, Flemish).


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The recorded history of Germanic languages begins with their speakers’ first
contact with the Romans, in the 1st century BCE. At that time and for several centuries thereafter, there was only a single “Germanic” language, with little more than minor dialect differences. Only after about the 6th century CE can one speak of a “German” (i.e., High German) language.
German is an inflected language with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and strong and weak verbs. Altogether, German is the native language of more than 90 million speakers and thus ranks among the languages with the most native speakers worldwide. German is widely studied as a foreign language and is one of the main cultural languages of the Western world.
As a written language, German is quite uniform; it differs in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland no more than written English does in the United States and the British Commonwealth. As a spoken language, however, German exists in many dialects, most of which belong to either the High German or Low German dialectal groups. The main difference between High and Low German is in the sound system, especially in the consonants. High German, the language of the southern highlands of Germany, is the official written language.