North Germanic languages

The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish scholars and people.

The term North Germanic languages is used in comparative linguistics, whereas the term Scandinavian languages appears in studies of the modern standard languages and the dialect continuum of Scandinavia. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are close enough to form a strong mutual intelligibility where cross-border communication in native languages is very common, particularly between the latter two.

Approximately 20 million people in the Nordic countries speak a Scandinavian language as their native language, including an approximately 5% minority in Finland. Besides being the only North Germanic language with official status in two separate sovereign states, Swedish is also the most spoken of the languages overall. 15% of the population in Greenland speak Danish as a first language.

This language branch is separated from the West Germanic languages, consisting of languages like English, Dutch, and German to the south, and does not include the Finnic and Sami languages spoken in the same region, which belong to the completely unrelated Uralic language family.

The modern languages and their dialects in this group are:

The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible to some degree during the Migration Period (AD 300 to 600), so that some individual varieties are difficult to classify. Dialects with the features assigned to the northern group formed from the Proto-Germanic language in the late Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe.

Eventually, around the year AD 200, speakers of the North Germanic branch became distinguishable from the other Germanic language speakers^{[citation needed]}. The early development of this language branch is attested through runic inscriptions.

The North Germanic group is characterized by a number of phonological and morphological innovations shared with West Germanic: