NationMaster - Encyclopedia: West Germanic language

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.

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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
      - Alem�n Coloneiro (spoken in Venezuela)
    - Walser
    - Austro-Bavarian
      - Bavarian
      - Cimbrian (with a heavy influx of Italian vocabulary)
      - M�cheno
      - Hutterite German (spoken by Hutterites)
  - Fr�nkisch (extinct in the 1800s)
- Yiddish (with a significant influx of vocabulary from Hebrew and written in the Hebrew alphabet)
- Wymysojer

Germanic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (1632 words)
	The common ancestor of all languages comprising this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the latter mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age Northern Europe.
	The largest Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 380 and 120 million native speakers respectively.The group consists of other notable languages, such as Dutch with 22 and Afrikaans with 16 million speakers; and the Scandinavian languages including Danish, Norwegian and Swedish with a combined total of about 20 million speakers.
	During the early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand, and by the High German consonant shift on the continent on the other, resulting in Upper German and Low Saxon, with graded intermediate Central German varieties.

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