page_title: Languages of Europe
section_title: Germanic
hierarchical_section_title: Languages of Europe / Indo-European languages / Germanic
caption_attribution_description: English: The present-day distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe: North Germanic languages &#160; Icelandic &#160; Faroese &#160; Norwegian &#160; Danish &#160; Swedish West Germanic languages &#160; Scots &#160; English &#160; Frisian &#160; Dutch &#160; Low German &#160; German Dots indicate areas where multilingualism is common.
context_page_description: Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family.
  Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language; within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Romance, Slavic, and Germanic with more than 200 million speakers each, between them accounting for close to 90% of Europeans. Smaller phyla of Indo-European found in Europe include Hellenic, Baltic, Albanian, Indo-Aryan, and Celtic.
  Of the approximately 45 million Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, most speak languages within either the Uralic or Turkic families. Still smaller groups account for less than 1% of the European population between them. Immigration has added sizeable communities of speakers of African and Asian languages, amounting to about 4% of the population, with Arabic being the most widely spoken of them.
  Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: French, Italian, German, English, and Russian. While Russian has the largest number of native speakers, English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language.
context_section_description: The Germanic languages make up the predominant language family in Western, Northern and Central Europe. An estimated 210 million Europeans are native speakers of Germanic languages, the largest groups being German (c. 95 million), English (c. 70 million), Dutch (c. 24 million), Swedish (c. 10 million), Danish (c. 6 million), and Norwegian (c. 5 million).
  There are two extant major sub-divisions: West Germanic and North Germanic. A third group, East Germanic, is now extinct; the only known surviving East Germanic texts are written in the Gothic language. West Germanic is divided into Anglo-Frisian (including English), Low German, and Low Franconian (including Dutch) and High German (including Standard German).
caption: The present-day distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe: North Germanic languages   Icelandic   Faroese   Norwegian   Swedish   Danish West Germanic languages   Scots   English   Frisian   Dutch   Low German   German Dots indicate areas where multilingualism is common.
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