Let’s take grammar as one of the examples. Now, let’s take a glance at similarities in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Phrases are not the same, but the similarity is apparent. Let's take a look at the phrases like ‘Good morning,’ which is in ‘Guten Morgen’ in German, ‘Godmorgen’ in Danish, ‘Goedemorgen’ in Dutch, or ‘God morgon’ in Swedish. However, descendants of Proto-Germanic are more similar to English than it seems at first sight. It seems like they have more differences than similarities. Who would say that these languages are like siblings, right? They share the same core in grammar, for example, or vocabulary. It means that English is similar to German, Dutch, or Afrikaans, because they come from the same Germanic branch. So, according to many studies, and linguists’ conclusion, we can say that English belongs to the Germanic language family, the West Germanic branch. They use many factors among others: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary conclude their mutual ancestor. The linguists’ job is to determine the language family tree. To determine whether a language belongs to a specific language family, it is not enough to say that it is similar (or not) to the other languages. Today, in English vocabulary we can find around 30% of theĪnd yes, thousands of words, almost 30% come from Latin, as well.Įven though many would disagree that English belongs to the Germanic language family, it actually does. That power can be searched centuries and centuries ago, back in 1066, when influence started and continued after the The reason why English seems similar to the Romance language family, especially French, is that this language family influenced English over many centuries. The most popular East Germanic language, and the last to extinct, wasĭoes English Belong to Romance Languages? Even today, these languages have a lot in common.Īfrikaans, Dutch, English, German, Luxembourgish, Yiddish, and Frisian languages belong to the West Germanic languages.Įastern Germanic language branch, unfortunately, doesn’t exist due to its languages’ extinction. All these languages are descendants of Old Norse, spoken by the Germanic tribes in Scandinavia. This language tree includes Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Faroese. North Germanic languages are familiar as Scandinavian languages. When saying Germanic languages, we mean all languages that evolved from Proto-Germanic language, their ancestor.Īround the 5th century, an ancient Proto-Germanic started to split into three main branches: Northern, Western, and Eastern. One, big, part of today’s languages comes from the Indo-European language family, which is divided into several subfamilies as Germanic, Slavic, or Romance language family. So, to prove it, we are going to talk about Germanic languages, and, more importantlu, we're going to discover whether English belongs to this language tree and why. Some would even say that it belongs to Romance languages. However, today, many wouldn’t say that English is a Germanic language. They belong to same groups and have shared roots.Īs for English, it belongs to the Germanic language family. Just like people, languages have families too.