Germanic languages

The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of approximately 500 million people mainly in North America, Oceania, Western and Northern Europe. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic—also known as Common Germanic—which was spoken in approximately the middle-1st millennium BC in Iron Age Northern Europe. PG, 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 varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Northern Europe in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of today's northern Germany and southern Denmark. The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 300–400 million native English speakers and over 100 million native German speakers, both belonging to the West Germanic family. This group includes also other major languages, such as Dutch with 23 million, Low Saxon with approximately 5 million speakers in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands, and Afrikaans—an offshoot of several Dutch dialects—with over 7.2 million native speakers. The North Germanic languages include Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. There is also the East Germanic branch, which includes languages such as Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic. It has been extinct for at least 2 centuries.