The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic peoples settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire in the second century BC.
The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 310-375 million[1][2] and over 100 million[3] native speakers respectively. The group includes other major languages, such as Dutch with 23 million[4] and Afrikaans with over 6 million native speakers[5]; and the North Germanic languages including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese with a combined total of about 20 million speakers.[6] The SIL Ethnologue lists 53 different Germanic languages.