North Germanic languages

The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish scholars and people.

North Germanic
Nordic Scandinavian
Ethnicity	North Germanic peoples
Geographic distribution	Northern Europe
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Germanic North Germanic
Proto-language	Proto-Norse (attested), later Old Norse
Subdivisions	East Scandinavian West Scandinavian Gutnish
ISO 639-5	`gmq`
Glottolog	`nort3160`
North Germanic-speaking lands Continental Scandinavian languages: Danish Norwegian Swedish Insular Nordic languages: Faroese Icelandic Norn (†) Greenlandic Norse (†) Extinct Norn was spoken in Orkney, Shetland and Caithness in what is now Scotland until the 19th century. Extinct Greenlandic Norse was spoken in the Norse settlements of Greenland until their demise in the late 15th century.

The term North Germanic languages is used in comparative linguistics,[1] whereas the term Scandinavian languages appears in studies of the modern standard languages and the dialect continuum of Scandinavia.[2][3] Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are close enough to form a strong mutual intelligibility where cross-border communication in native languages is very common, particularly between the latter two.

Approximately 20 million people in the Nordic countries speak a Scandinavian language as their native language,[4] including an approximately 5% minority in Finland. Besides being the only North Germanic language with official status in two separate sovereign states, Swedish is also the most spoken of the languages overall. 15% of the population in Greenland speak Danish as a first language.[5]

This language branch is separated from the West Germanic languages to the south, like English and Dutch. It is also distinct from Finnish just to the East which belongs to a completely different language family: the Uralic languages.

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article North Germanic languages, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.