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My friends might have heard about language families before, and today we’ll be talking about Germanic languages. When we say Germanic languages, we’re referring to all of the languages that were once part of the language ancestor Proto-Germanic. Linguists believe this language was spoken between ca. 500 BCE until around the 5th century CE, when it began to split into different branches (more on these branches in a minute).

So which languages are in this family, and how do they compare to each other today? Let’s have a look.

Which Languages Are Members Of The Germanic Family?

Besides the obvious answer, German, there are at least 47 living Germanic languages around today. Most linguists talk about this language family in terms of three branches: the Northern, Eastern and Western Germanic languages. From these three branches, we can group all the Germanic languages we know today.

The Northern Germanic languages (also known as Scandinavian or Nordic languages) include Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. This whole branch descended from Old Norse, and still enjoys quite a bit of mutual intelligibility between the languages today.

The Western Germanic languages include German, English, Dutch, Frisian, Pennsylvania Dutch, Luxembourgish, Yiddish and Afrikaans, along with a variety of disparate languages that often get lumped together as German or Dutch dialects. Unfortunately, all of the Eastern Germanic languages went extinct starting in the 4th century, and the last living language of this branch died in the late 18th century.