North Germanic languages
branch of the Germanic languages spoken in the Nordic countries, Estonia, Germany, and Scotland
The North Germanic languages are one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish scholars and people.
The term North Germanic languages is used in comparative linguistics, whereas the term Scandinavian languages appears in studies of the modern standard languages and the dialect continuum of Scandinavia. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are close enough to form a strong mutual intelligibility where cross-border communication in native languages is very common, particularly between the latter two.
Approximately 20 million people in the Nordic countries speak a Scandinavian language as their native language, including an approximately 5% minority in Finland. Besides being the only North Germanic language with official status in two separate sovereign states, Swedish is also the most spoken of the languages overall. 15% of the population in Greenland speak Danish as a first language.
This language branch is separated from the West Germanic languages, consisting of languages like English, Dutch, and German to the south, and does not include the Finnic and Sami languages spoken in the same region, which belong to the completely unrelated Uralic language family.
Modern languages and dialects
The modern languages and their dialects in this group are:
East Scandinavian
Danish
Jutlandic dialects
North Jutlandic
East Jutlandic
West/Mid Jutlandic
South Jutlandic
Angel Danish / Southern Schleswig Danish
Insular Danish
Bornholm (and historically East Danish)
Bokmål (Norwegian written standard)
Swedish
Göta dialects
Gotland dialects
Svealand dialects
Norrland dialects
East Swedish dialects
Finland Swedish
Estonian Swedish
Scanian
Gutnish
West Scandinavian
Norwegian
Nynorsk (Norwegian written standard)
Trønder dialects
East Norwegian dialects
West Norwegian dialects
North Norwegian dialects
Dalecarlian language
Elfdalian
Faroese
Icelandic
History
Distinction from East and West Germanic
The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible to some degree during the Migration Period (AD 300 to 600), so that some individual varieties are difficult to classify.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q106085. The Library of Congress control number is sh85117963. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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