Classification of Modern Germanic languages; countries where they

are spoken.

GERMANIC LANGUAGES, a group of closely related languages belonging to the

Indo-European language family, which are currently spoken by more than 600
million people. Modern Germanic languages include: English, Afrikaans, Dutch
(or Dutch-Flemish), Danish, Yiddish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Faroese, Frisian and
Swedish. Of these languages, English and Dutch have the largest distribution
area; the largest number of people speak English and German.
English is spoken as a mother tongue by more than 300 million people living
mainly in Australia, the British Isles, Canada, New Zealand, the United States
and South Africa; in addition, millions of people around the world use it as a
second or foreign language.
German is spoken as a native language by about 98 million people in Austria,
Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and in some parts of France; in addition, it
is a second language for many residents of Central Europe.
The Dutch language (which is called Dutch in the Netherlands and Flemish in
Belgium or in French Flanders) is native to about 20 million people in the
Netherlands, Belgium, the Virgin Islands, Suriname and Curacao, and it is still
used in Indonesia.
Frisian is the native language of several hundred thousand inhabitants of
the province of Friesland in the Netherlands. Swedish is spoken by 9 million
people in Sweden and in some parts of Norway and Finland, Danish – 5 million
in Denmark and the northern part of Schleswig, as well as in Greenland,
Norwegian – about 5 million in Norway, and Icelandic – almost 300 thousand
in Iceland. Yiddish, or Hebrew-German, is basically a German dialect with an
admixture of Hebrew, Polish and Russian elements. It is spoken by Jews who
emigrated from Central Europe, as well as their descendants. The number of
Yiddish speakers is decreasing, it is gradually being replaced by the languages
of the new countries of residence of Jews (for example, in Israel – Hebrew).

All Germanic languages go back to one ancestor language, which is called

Proto-Germanic and which is not attested in written monuments, but its
structure can be revealed by comparing the earliest dialects reflected in the
oldest texts. Ancient Germanic dialects are traditionally divided geographically
into three groups: northern, eastern and western. Thus, texts in the Germanic
dialects of the Scandinavian north (including Greenland and Iceland) are called
North Germanic; everything related to the language of the tribes who settled
in the early period in the Baltic region east of the Oder River (such as the
Burgundians, Goths and Vandals) is called East Germanic; everything written in
the dialects of the tribes who lived between the Oder and the Elbe, as well as
directly to the south and west of this territory, is called West German.