The Germanic languages constitute a sub-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.
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.
Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:
- The levelling of the Indo-European verbal system of tense and aspect into the present tense and the past tense (also called the preterit)
- A large class of verbs that use a dental suffix (/d/ or /t/) instead of vowel alternation (Indo-European ablaut) to indicate past tense; these are called the Germanic weak verbs; the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the Germanic strong verbs
- The use of so-called strong and weak adjectives: different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives depending on the definiteness of the noun phrase (modern English adjectives do not inflect at all, except for the comparative and superlative; this was not the case in Old English, where adjectives were inflected differently depending on the type of their preceding determiner)
- The consonant shift known as Grimm's Law (which continued in German in a second shift known as the High German consonant shift)
- Some words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families but with variants that appear in almost all Germanic languages; see Germanic substrate hypothesis
- The sound change known as Verner’s Law, which left a trace of Indo-European accent variations in voicing variations in fricatives
- The shifting of word stress onto word stems and later onto the first syllable of the word (though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what is added to them
