The Germanic languages

The Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a group of related languages constituting a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all languages comprising this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe.
Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law.
Early Germanic varieties enter history with the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire from the second century.
Currently, the most-spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 400 and 100 million native speakers respectively. The group includes other major languages, such as Dutch with 23 million and Afrikaans with over 16 million speakers; and the North Germanic languages including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese with a combined total of about 20 million speakers.

Germanic Language Family tree
All Germanic languages are thought to have descended from the Proto-Germanic language ancestor, united by subjection to the sound shifts of Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law that took place in 500BC, and Proto-Germanic itself is believed to have been spoken after 500BC.

List of all Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are divided into three branches; East Germanic languages, West Germanic languages and North Germanic languages.
East Germanic languages
The East Germanic language branch consists of the extinct Germanic languages. These include:

• 
  Burgundian;
  
• 
  Gothic; and
  
• 
  Vandalic.
  

Crimean Gothic survived the longest and was used for communication in parts of Crimea up until the late 18th century.
West Germanic languages


The West Germanic language branch is the largest of the three and also includes the three most widely spoken Germanic languages, which are English, German and Dutch. West Germanic languages are spoken by nearly 500 million people natively.
Among the dead West Germanic languages are Old Franconian, Old High German, and Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) from which Dutch, German, and English respectively developed.

• 
  English
  
• 
  Scots
  
• 
  German
  
• 
  Frisian
  
• 
  Dutch
  
• 
  Afrikaans
  
• 
  Yiddish