West Germanic languages - Definition and Overview

West Germanic is the largest branch of the Germanic family of languages, including such languages as English, Dutch, and German.

The other families of Germanic are North Germanic and East Germanic.

History

There was never a West Germanic proto-language from which all the languages currently in the group seem to have derived. As such the grouping is more of a geographical convenience to categorize languages that share many similarities with each other but also individually compare closely to particular aspects of North Germanic or East Germanic.

Family tree

Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.

• Anglic (descending from Anglo-Saxon)
  • Modern English (with a significant influx of French vocabulary)
  • Lowland Scots
  • Cayman Islands English (not a creole)
  • Angloromani (with a significant influx of Romany vocabulary)
• Frisian
• Low German (descending from Old Saxon / Old Low Franconian)
  • Low Franconian
    • Dutch
    • West Flemish
    • Limburgish
    • Afrikaans (with a significant influx of vocabulary from Malay and native African languages)
  • Low Saxon
    • Several dialects in northern Germany and the Netherlands
    • Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German)
  • East Low German
• High German
  • German
    • Middle German
      • East Middle German
        • Standard German
        • Lower Silesian
        • Upper Saxon
      • West Middle German
        • Luxembourgeois
        • Several dialects in western Germany
        • Pennsylvania German
    • Upper German
      • Alemannic
        • Swiss German
        • Swabian
        • Alemán Coloneiro (spoken in Venezuela)
      • Walser
      • Austro-Bavarian
        • Bavarian
        • Cimbrian (with a heavy influx of Italian vocabulary)
        • Mócheno
        • Hutterite German (spoken by Hutterites)
    • Fränkisch (extinct in the 1800s)
  • Yiddish (with a significant influx of vocabulary from Hebrew and written in the Hebrew alphabet)
  • Wymysojer

See also

• List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents