Germanic languages

English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family. It emerged in early medieval England and has since become a global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain after the end of Roman rule. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire and the United States. It is the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers. However, English is only the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

West Germanic language

branch of the Indo-European language family

Luxembourgish ( ; also Luxemburgish, Luxembourgian, Letzebu(e)rgesch; ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide.

group of languages

group of extinct Indo-European languages in the Germanic family

proto-language of the Germanic languages

Plautdietsch () or Mennonite Low German is a Low Prussian dialect of East Low German with Dutch influence that developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia. The word Plautdietsch translates to "flat (or low) German" (referring to the plains of northern Germany). In other Low German dialects, the word for Low German is usually realised as Plattdütsch/Plattdüütsch or Plattdüütsk , – very often also as Plattdeutsch – but the spelling Plautdietsch is used to refer specifically to the Vistula variant of the language.

extinct East Germanic language

extinct Germanic language

efforts at retaining Germanic influences in the English language

Gutnish ( ), or rarely Gutnic ( or ), is a North Germanic language spoken sporadically on the islands of Gotland and Fårö. The different dialects of Gutnish, while stemming from the Old Gutnish () variety of Old Norse, are sometimes considered part of modern Swedish. Gutnish exists in two variants, Mainland Gutnish (Storlandsgutamål or Storlandsmål), mostly spoken in the southern and southeastern portion of Gotland, where the dialect of Lau became the standard form on the Main Island (Lau Gutnish → Laumål), and Fårö Gutnish (Gutnish: Faroymal; ), spoken on the island of Fårö. UNESCO defines Gu

grammatical change of vowels in Indo-European languages

type of Germanic verb where the stem vowel changes in the past tense

geolinguistic region

type of verb in Germanic languages

Petuh (Petu) is a mixed language of Flensburg, a mixture of German, Low German, Danish, and Southern Jutish spoken in Flensburg on the German–Danish border. It is High German in vocabulary (with some Danish concepts and loan translations), but it has Danish and Low Saxon grammar and syntax. It originated in the 19th century and was still vibrant in the 1950s, but it is now on the verge of extinction.

terminology

thumb|Dem Deutschen Volke (), the dedication on the Reichstag building in [[Berlin]] The German noun Volk () translates to people, both uncountable in the sense of people as in a crowd, and countable (plural Völker) in the sense of a people as in an ethnic group or nation (compare the English term folk).

language group

philologist, etymologist & educator (1877–1964)

language group

zonal constructed language designed for communication amongst speakers of Germanic languages