Germanic Languages

The Indo-European language family is subdivided into multiple branches. One of them are the Germanic languages. The Germanic languages are the most spoken languages in the world. Languages of the Germanic branch like Dutch or German are spoken by millions of people around the world. English is one of the few languages with more than one billion speakers.

Subgroups

The Germanic languages are subdivided into multible subgroups. There are the North Germanic Languages, that are mainly spoken in Scandinavia, the West Germanic languages, primarily spoken in Western Europe and the British isles. There are also the extinct East Germanic languages, which were spoken in Europe.

English is the language with the third most native speakers (450 million) after Mandarin and Spanish, while German, the Germanic language with second most speakers (100 million), ranks 10th in the world, after Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese.

History

The Germannic languages are all related to eachother, all of them probably deriving from a parent language. Unlike Romance languages, which derived all from Latin, Germanic languages‘ parent language has no written records. A part of it, however, can be reconstructed through comparison of the existent languages. For example, linguists deduced that the word „guest“ in Proto-Germanic (the reconstructed parent language of the Germanic languages) would have been „*gastiz“ by comparing the words „gasts“ (Gothic), „gestr“ (Old Norse), „giest“ (Old English), „iest“ (Old Frisian) and „gast“ (Old Saxon and Old High German). The * indicates that the word is reconstructed.

English

As already said, English is the most spoken language of the world. It is far less conservative than other Germanic languages like German. Its history started in the 5th century, when Jutes, Saxons and Angles arrived in Britain. They were speaking Proto-West-Germanic which eventually evolved to Old English. The Old English language eentually evolved into Middle English after the Norman Invasion in 1066. The French-speaking Normans influenced the Middle English language. Many words in modern English are originally French. There are some examples of words that sound completely different in Old English than in Middle or modern English. If one is reading an Old English text and finds the word "hæwen", he will have no clue that this actually means "blue". "Blue" originates from Middle French bleu, and was brought by the Normans in the 11th century. In the modern era English spread through colonists everywhere in the wolrd. Now English is spoken on every continent, either as a main language or a lingua franca, a language that is used in multilingual community to communicate.

German

German is the most-spoken language of the European Union. Even though it was influenced by other non-Germanic languages, it's far more conservative than English. Alike to English, German also had early forms, Old High German and Middle High German. Germanic tribes lived in the modern German territory during the time of the Romans. Those tribes spoke Germanic languages. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Germanic languages in Southern and Middle Germany evolved into Old High German. The Old High German had a few other influences. Middle High German and later German evolved from it, influenced by other contemporary languages.