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The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
Today, German is one of the major languages of the world. It is the most spoken native language within the European Union. German is also widely taught as a foreign language, especially in continental Europe (where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French), and in the United States. The language has been influential ...
Roman bronze statuette representing a Germanic man with his hair in a Suebian knot. Dating to the late 1st century – early 2nd century A.D. The Germanic peoples were tribal groups who lived in the north of Europe in Classical Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In modern scholarship, they typically include not only the Roman-era Germani who ...
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family— English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several ...
Yiddish ( ייִדיש, יידיש or אידיש, yidish or idish, pronounced [ˈ (j)ɪdɪʃ], lit. 'Jewish'; ייִדיש-טײַטש, historically also Yidish-Taytsh, lit. 'Judeo-German') [10] is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originates from the 9th century [11] : 2 Central Europe, providing the ...
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, English, French, Italian, and German. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, [ 4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe .)
For the distinction between [ ], / / and , see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. The phonology of Standard German is the standard pronunciation or accent of the German language. It deals with current phonology and phonetics as well as with historical developments thereof as well as the geographical variants and the influence of ...
German dialects are the various traditional local varieties of the German language.Though varied by region, those of the southern half of Germany beneath the Benrath line are dominated by the geographical spread of the High German consonant shift, and the dialect continuum that connects German to the neighboring varieties of Low Franconian and Frisian.