The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in 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 law. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic peoples moving down from northern Europe in the second century BC, to settle in northern central Europe, along the boundary of Celtic civilization, in the northerly lands of the future Roman Empire.
Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:
The leveling of the Indo-European verbal system of tense and aspect into the present tense and the past tense (also called the preterite)
The use of so-called strong and weak adjectives:
The consonant shift known as (which continued in German in a second shift known as the High German consonant shift)
Some words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families, but variants appear in almost all Germanic languages; see Germanic substrate hypothesis
The shifting of word stress onto word stems and later on the first syllable of the word (though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what is added to them)
Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than do some other language families such as the Romance or Slavic languages. Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward analyticity.
