ABSTRACT
The Germanic languages currently spoken fall into two major groups: North Germanic (or Scandinavian) and West Germanic. The former group comprises: Danish, Norwegian (i.e. both the Dano-Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk), Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese. The latter: English (in all its varieties), German (in all its varieties, including Yiddish and Pennsylvania German), Dutch (including Flemish and Afrikaans) and Frisian. The varieties of English are particularly extensive and include not just the dialectal and regional variants of the British Isles, North America, Australasia, India and Africa, but also numerous English-based pidgins and creoles of the Atlantic (e.g. Jamaican Creole and Pidgin Krio) and the Pacific (e.g. Hawaiian Pidgin and Tok Pisin). When one adds to this list the regions of the globe in which Scandinavian, German and Dutch are spoken, the geographical distribution of the Germanic languages is more extensive than that of any other group of languages. In every continent there are countries in which a modern Germanic language (primarily English) is extensively used or has some official status (as a national or regional language). Demographically there are at least 465 million native speakers of Germanic languages in the world today, divided as follows: North Germanic, 20 million (Danish 5.5 million, Norwegian 5 million, Swedish 9.2 million, Icelandic 330,000 and Faroese 66,000); West Germanic apart from English, 125–130 million (almost 88 million for German in European countries in which it has official status, German worldwide 95–100 million, Dutch and Flemish and Afrikaans 29 million, Frisian 480,000); English worldwide, 320–380 million first language users, plus 300–500 million users in countries like India and Singapore in which English has official status (cf. Crystal 2003).
