Germanic languages as a branch of ie language family

The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 5million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. For example, what makes the Germanic languages a branch of Indo-European is that much of their structure and phonology can be stated in rules that apply to all of them. Many of their common features are presumed innovations that took place in Proto- Germanic , the source of all the Germanic languages.

Each subfamily in this list contains subgroups and individual languages. We know more about the history and relationships of the IE languages than about any other group of languages. Learn to read languages with interlinear bilingual books that include the original language and an English translation below in a smaller font. The canonical centum languages of the Indo-European family are the western branches : Hellenic, Celtic, Italic and Germanic.

They merged Proto-Indo-European palatovelars and plain velars, yielding plain velars only (centumisation) but retained the labiovelars as a distinct set. German retains most of the Proto- Germanic language , but is least like the other languages in its group. Consequently, it is the most difficult to learn.

The noun cases are easier than those of the Slavic languages , but they still give English speakers several problems. A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language , called the proto- language of that family. The term family reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a. In Europe there are two large (usually considered to be unrelated) families that have had a lot of contact: Finno-Ugric and Indo-European. Languages in the first group belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia.

Just as languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian are all descended from Latin, Indo-European languages are believed to derive from a hypothetical language known as Proto-Indo-European, which is no longer spoken. Both German and English belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. This is because of the language spoken by the Germanic tribes that invaded England-West Germanic is the group within the Germanic branch of Indo-European to which English and German belong to. English is in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.

Nearly one-half of humans currently speak a language from the Indo-European family. All Indo-European languages can be traced to a common ancestor. In the family tree provided below, the languages in the bottom boxes are the largest member language (s) of their respective branches. Germanic languages - Germanic languages - The emergence of Germanic languages : Like every language spoken over a considerable geographic area, Proto- Germanic presumably consisted of a number of geographic varieties or dialects that over time developed in different ways into the different early and modern Germanic languages.

Late-19th-century scholars used a family tree diagram to show this. This means that it belongs to an early grouping of Indo-European which distinguishes itself from other languages of this family by having undergone a series of changes to consonants in initial position. The most widely studied language family in the world is the Indo-European.

There are a number of reasons for this: Many of the most important languages of the world are Indo-European. These languages are official or co-official in many countries and are important in academic, technical and world organisations. The family of languages is the second-oldest in the worl only behind the Afroasiatic family (which includes the languages of ancient Egypt and early Semitic languages ). In terms of written evidence, the earliest Indo-European languages that researchers have found include the Hittite, Luwian, and Mycenaean Greek languages.

Or more accurately, Proto-Indo European became English. However, it was not a direct shift, and English has hundreds of related languages. Romance languages , group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.