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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’, ‘southern africa’, and ‘central’, ‘western’, and ‘northern europe’)
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(it is the third most spoken ‘indo-european subdivision’, behind ‘italic’ and ‘indo-iranian’, and ahead of ‘balto-slavic languages’)
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(the ‘west germanic branch’ includes the 3 most widely spoken ‘germanic languages’…)
“english”
(approximately 360–400 million native speakers)
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“german”
(over 100 million native speakers)
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“dutch”
(23 million native speakers)
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(other major ‘west germanic languages’ are ‘afrikaans’ (an offshoot of ‘dutch’) with over 7.1 million native speakers, ‘low german’ with roughly ‘6.7 million native speakers’ (considered a separate collection of ‘dialects’); ‘5 million’ in ‘germany’ and ‘1.7 million’ in ‘the netherlands’), ‘yiddish’ (once used by approximately ’13 million jews’ in ‘pre-world war II europe’), and ‘scots’, both with ‘1.5 million native speakers’)
(‘limburgish varieties’ have roughly ‘1.3 million speakers’ along the ‘dutch–belgian–german border’)
(the main ‘north germanic languages’ are ‘norwegian’, ‘danish’, ‘swedish’, ‘icelandic’, and ‘faroese’, which have a combined total of about ’20 million speakers’)
(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’)
(the SIL ethnologue lists 48 different ‘living germanic languages’, of which 41 belong to the ‘western branch’, and 6 to the ‘northern branch’; they place the ‘hunsrik language’ in neither of the categories, though it is often considered a dialect of the ‘german language’ by linguists)
(the total number of ‘germanic languages’ throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially ‘east germanic languages’—disappeared during or 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’)
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(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’)
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👈👈👈☜*“INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES”* ☞ 👉👉👉
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💕💝💖💓🖤💙🖤💙🖤💙🖤❤️💚💛🧡❣️💞💔💘❣️🧡💛💚❤️🖤💜🖤💙🖤💙🖤💗💖💝💘
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*🌈✨ *TABLE OF CONTENTS* ✨🌷*
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🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥*we won the war* 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥