West Germanic languages
group of languages
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of Indo-European languages (the others being the North Germanic and the extinct East Germanic languages). The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into three branches: North Sea Germanic, which includes English, Scots, the Low German languages, and the Frisian languages; Weser–Rhine Germanic, which encompasses Dutch and its close relatives; and Elbe Germanic, which includes German and its close relatives and variants.
English is by far the most widely spoken West Germanic language, with over one billion speakers worldwide. Within Europe, the three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct variety of West Germanic. The language family also includes Afrikaans, Yiddish, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Hunsrik, and Scots. Additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch, English, or German.
History
Origins and characteristics
The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. In some cases, their exact relation was difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, so that some individual varieties have been difficult to classify. This is especially true for the unattested Jute language; today, most scholars classify Jute as a West Germanic variety with several features of North Germanic.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Germanic languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.