The Germanic languages constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic (also known as Common Germanic), which was spoken in approximately the 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. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic peoples moving south from northern Europe in the 2nd century BC, to settle in north-central Europe.
English is a Germanic language as are German, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese and Icelandic. This means that it belongs to an early grouping of Indo-European which distinguishes itself from other languages of this family by having undergone a series of changes to consonants in initial position. In general, stops become fricatives due to the operation of the Germanic Sound Shift (sometimes also called Grimm’s Law). This is assumed to have taken place many centuries BC. The operation of this law can be recognised by comparing words in Latin with their cognates (etymologically related forms) in English as in the following table.
From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three groups, West, East and North Germanic:
The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 309–400 million and over 100 million native speakers respectively. The group includes other major languages, such as Dutch with 23 million and Afrikaans with over 6 million native speakers; and the North Germanic languages including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese with a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The SIL Ethnologue lists 53 different Germanic languages.
