Germanic Languages facts

While investigating facts about Germanic Languages List and Germanic Languages Tree, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Many courses in German Universities are actually offered in English, and international students don’t even have to meet the German language requirements to apply. In Germany undergraduate students don’t pay any tuition fees in all the public universities since October 2014

how many germanic languages are there?

A major reason why native English speakers have issues understanding German humour, is that the German language is way too precise to allow for the humorous confusions found in English. Also, German humour is usually delivered with a deadpan, which makes foreigners think they're being serious.

What countries speak germanic languages?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what are all the germanic languages. Here are 50 of the best facts about Germanic Languages Definition and Germanic Languages Comparison I managed to collect.

what are the germanic languages?

Because Germany dubs Hollywood movies to their native language, for every Hollywood movie-star there is an equivalent German voice actor who is used again and again in the same films as their counterpart.
The Czech language was saved from extinction by puppet shows. In the 17th century, the Catholic Ferdinand II forced the Protestant Czech people to speak in German and banned the Czech language. Puppets were the only remaining entities that had the right to speak Czech in public places.
Because babies listen to the languages spoken around them while still in the womb, they develop distinctive cries that reflect this when they're born. Thus - babies cry with an accent, making it possible to distinguish a French baby from a German baby, based purely on the way they cry.
That, until it was forcibly suppressed during WWI, German was the second most widely spoken language in the USA, with many local governments, schools, and newspapers operating in German.
There is an American restaurant chain, "Der Wienerschnitzel", that contains three German language errors in its name. The gender is incorrect, the restaurant serves hot dogs (not Wiener schnitzel), and a missing space implies that residents of Vienna have been used as an ingredient.
American speech is punctuated with "uh" & "um", English speech with "er" & "erm", Japanese with "ā", "anō", & "ēto", German with "äh", French with "euh"-- basically, every language uses different sounds to interrupt themselves while their brain is working on forming thoughts into words.
German was the second largest spoken language in the U.S. before it was forcibly oppressed during the First World War. Americans with German ancestry, are still the single largest ethnic group in the U.S.
Tina Turner is no longer an American citizen. She has passed a German language test and Swiss history test and is exclusively a Swiss citizen after giving up her American citizenship.
“shitstorm” has been adopted into the German language as, a perfectly polite noun meaning, an internet born controversy
A German woman named Thea Alba became famous in the 1920s because she's could write 10 different things with all 10 fingers at the same time. She could also write using both hands, both feet, and her mouth simultaneously spelling in different languages.

germanic languages facts — What are the germanic languages list?

Germanic Languages data charts

For your convenience take a look at Germanic Languages figures with stats and charts presented as graphic.

germanic languages fact data chart about Lexical Similarity of selected Romance, Germanic, and Slavic — Lexical Similarity of selected Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages

germanic languages fact data chart about Gender of the country names in the German language — Gender of the country names in the German language

Why do germanic languages use the latin alphabet?

You can easily fact check why are they called germanic languages by examining the linked well-known sources.

Tesla could speak eight languages : Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and even Latin.

Tagalog is the fifth most spoken language in the united states, ranking higher than Vietnamese, Korean, German, Arabic and Russian. - source

Deadpool is multilingual, with the ability to speak fluently in German, Spanish, ASL(Sign Language) and Japanese, in addition to his native English and he is Omnisexual. "Deadpool is whatever sexual inclination his brain tells him he is in THAT moment. And then the moment passes." - source

Pope John Paul II was a polyglot. He spoke 12 languages; Polish, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, German, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and Esperanto. He used 9 as Pope. He learned them in 1938, just before the Nazis occupied Poland.

The Pennsylvania Dutch aren't actually Dutch, they are German. Upon arrival, they were saying "Deutsch" which is German for, well, German. Germany in the their native language is "Deutschland." English speaking Americans just assumed they were saying "Dutch." - source

When did germanic languages split?

The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in South America in 1800 encountered a very old parrot that was the sole speaker of a dead Indian language, the original tribe having gone extinct."

How many languages are germanic?

Germans score higher than the English on IELTS, The International English Language Testing System

Victor Klemperer, Jewish KZ inmate and post-war professor of German literature, wrote a book which analyses how nazis introduced a nearly Orwellian kind of German language. Examples are "crisis" for defeat, "connection" (Anschluss) for annexation, and "enhanced interrogation" for torture.

Falco's 1985 single "Rock Me Amadeus" made him the only artist whose principal language was German to score a vocal number-one hit in the US.

German is an official language of Belgium despite being spoken natively by less than 1% of the population

LEGO launched 'braille bricks' for children to learn braille. The product is currently being tested in various languages too: Danish, Norwegian, English, Portuguese, German, Spanish, and French.

Germanic languages infographics

Beautiful visual representation of Germanic Languages numbers and stats to get perspecive of the whole story.

germanic languages fact infographic about Trick or Treater - be sure to change your language from Germ — Trick or Treater - be sure to change your language from German to English. Slow, but great detail in animation shots, skimming the lot for halloween flicks that ate kid friendly -

Interesting facts about germanic languages

In 1751 Bejamin Franklin wrote that German immigrants “swarm into our settlements” and “will never adopt our Language or Customs”. Today, 97% of German-Americans speak only English at home.

Belgium has 4 commonly spoken languages: Dutch, French, German (the 3 official languages) and English. 38% of Belgians use 2 or 3 languages at work and 27% of Belgians can converse in more than 3 languages.

About Esperanto, an attempt from 1887 to create an internationally spoken language. It's supposedly 5 times easier to learn than English or German and makes learning other languages easier. It's also available on Duolingo.

Quotation marks differ based on the language "english", «french», „german“ or »german«, ”swedish”, ...

India's former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao spoke 17 languages - 8 foreign languages (English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Greek, Latin and Persian) and 9 Indian languages (Telugu, Hindi, Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu)

How similar are germanic languages?

Most languages have a bias against left-handed people. Left is derived from 'lyft', meaning weak. In Dutch, 'Link' means cunning. In German, 'link' means questionable. In Mandarin, it's zuô, meaning improper, and in Turkish the word for left is sol, which can mean both 'die' and 'ill'.

Scots (the dominant language of Scotland) used to be a distinct Germanic Language from English all its own. But over the last century has gone into "Language death" as new generations adopt Standard English and has now mostly devolved into a dialect.

A translator for the European Commission in Brussels knows 32 languages including Greek, English, German, Italian, Russian, East African Swahili, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin and Bengali, plus some dead languages like Old Church Slavic.

German was the most-studied foreign language in the U.S. in the years before and even during World War I. About a quarter of high schoolers studied it right before the U.S. entered the war, but only about 1% of high schools still taught it after the war.

Frederick II, the 13th-century German king, performed an experiment to determine the natural language developed by infants who are raised without human interaction. Frederick experiment found that the babies grew up to speak no language because they all died due to malnourishment.

Babies pick up accents in the womb. For example, French babies tend to have rising note, while German babies tend to have a falling note. These tones mirror intonation patterns in French and German languages.

Frisian, a northern Germanic tongue, sounds more like English than any other extant language.

Thesauruses rarely exist for languages other than English. Compared to other languages, English has an unusually large number of synonyms due to the influence of very different language groups: Germanic (Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, the main basis of English), Romance (Latin, French), and Greek.

A survey of ~80,000 words estimated the origin of English words to be 28.3% French, 28.24% Latin, 25% Germanic, 5.32% Greek, 4.04% No etymology given, 3.28% Proper names, all other languages < 1%.

A WWI soldier injured in France in 1917, went on to marry the nurse that mistook him for a German spy and advised surgeons to take his life on the operating table. He accidentally spoke German to doctors while under a fever, and she took it as spy language. They were married for over 50 years.

Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show speaks seven languages: English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Tsonga and German.

There was a German mother of 3 who was ordered by her husband to go alone to the remote Georgian backcountry to learn Chechen. Broke, knowing no one nor any local language, she learned the Chechen & Georgian languages, adapted to village life in the mountains & is now a guide for German tourists

Benjamin Franklin critized the growing immigrant populaton in Pennsylvania, saying "[they] will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion". He was writing about German immigrants that would "Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them".

When Apple Lisa was released in the United States, it was only a few months later that it was released in other countries and languages including Italian, Spanish, German, French, and Scandinavian.

He excelled in high school, learning English, French, and German and the classical languages that were required for University admission.

This is our collection of basic interesting facts about Germanic Languages. The fact lists are intended for research in school, for college students or just to feed your brain with new realities. Possible use cases are in quizzes, differences, riddles, homework facts legend, cover facts, and many more. Whatever your case, learn the truth of the matter why is Germanic Languages so important!