Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:
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. Some, such as Icelandic, and to a lesser extent, German, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language. Others, such as English, Swedish, and Afrikaans, have moved toward a largely analytic type.
Another characteristic of Germanic languages is verb second (V2) word order, which is quite uncommon cross-linguistically. This feature is shared by all modern Germanic languages except modern English which has more or less replaced the earlier V2 structure with fixed Subject Verb Object word order.
