Germanic Language

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

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 latter 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[1]. Early Germanic varieties enter history with the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire from the 2nd century.

The largest Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 380 and 120 million native speakers respectively. The group consists of other major languages, such as Dutch with 22 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. For more on Grim's Law, Verners Law and the Germanic Laungauge tree[2]