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The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of approximately 500 million people mainly in North America, Oceania, Central Europe, Western and Northern Europe. The West Germanic branch includes the two most widely spoken Germanic languages: English, with approximately 360–400 million native speakers, and German, with over 100 million native speakers.〔SIL Ethnologue (2006). 95 million speakers of Standard German; 105 million including Middle and Upper German dialects; 120 million including Low Saxon and Yiddish.〕 Other major West Germanic languages are Dutch with 23 million speakers,〔(Dutch ), University College London〕 Low German with approximately 5 million in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands, and Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.2 million. The main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers.〔Holmberg, Anders and Christer Platzack (2005). "The Scandinavian languages". In ''The Comparative Syntax Handbook,'' eds Guglielmo Cinque and Richard S. Kayne. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. (Excerpt at Durham University ).〕 The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, all of which are now extinct. The last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 author=Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum )〕 The SIL ''Ethnologue'' lists 48 different living Germanic languages, of which 42 belong to the Western branch, and 6 to the Northern branch.〔(Ethnologue: Germanic )〕 The total number of Germanic languages through history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or shortly after the Migration Period. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic—also known as Common Germanic—which was spoken in approximately the middle-1st millennium BC in Iron Age Scandinavia. 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 tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of today's northern Germany and southern Denmark. ==Modern status== English is an official language of Belize, Canada, Falkland Islands, Malta, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and former British colonies in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. German is an official language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia, and Denmark; though Germany has had some colonial possessions, it lost those after World War I and German did not remain an official language there after the end of its colonial domination. Only in Namibia did German remain of some importance, where it is used by educated people and in commerce. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia. A German dialect, Pennsylvanian Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania, USA. Dutch is an official language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao, the Netherlands, Sint Maarten, and Suriname.〔http://taalunieversum.org/inhoud/feiten-en-cijfers〕 Even though the Netherlands also colonized Indonesia, Dutch was scrapped as an official language after Indonesian independence. In addition to being the official language in Sweden, Swedish is also an official language in Finland (where it is co-official with Finnish). Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is also spoken in other Southern African countries such as Zimbabwe and Botswana. Danish is an official language of Denmark and in its overseas territory of the Faroe Islands, and is a lingua franca and language of education in its other overseas territory of Greenland, where it was one of the official languages until 2009. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Germanic languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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