North Germanic Languages

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North Germanic Languages


	altname	Scandinavian
	region	Northern Europe
	familycolor	Indo-European
	fam1	Indo-European
	fam2	Germanic
	child1	Icelandic
	child2	Faroese
	child3	Norn
	child4	Norwegian
	child5	Danish
	child6	Swedish

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 East Germanic Languages . Derived from Proto-Norse and Old Norse , they are spoken in Denmark , Norway , Sweden , the Faroe Islands , Iceland and (to some extent) Greenland , as well as by a significant Swedish minority in Finland and by immigrant groups mainly in North America and Australia . The language group is often called either '''Scandinavian''' or, today, less frequently in the English language, '''Nordic languages'''. The latter term is a direct translation from "nordiska språk", most commonly used by both scholars and laymen in the Nordic Countries and is often favored by these when writing in English.

Often however the term ''Scandinavian'' ''(skandinavisk is used to designate merely the continental North Germanic languages, i.e. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, thus excluding Faroese and Icelandic. For example, in inter-Nordic contexts, texts may be labelled as either Finnish, Icelandic, or Scandinavian, where the latter will be written in either one of the three mutually comprehensible continental languages.Example: the Nordic Council's/Nordic Council of Ministers' political magazine ''Analys Norden'' ([http://www.analysnorden.org/ ).

CLASSIFICATION

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