Germanic languages
Distinctive characteristics

Germanic languages possess a number of defining features compared with other Indo-European languages.

Some of the best-known are the following:

Other significant characteristics are:

Some of the characteristics present in Germanic languages were not present in Proto-Germanic but developed later as areal features that spread from language to language:

Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward analyticity. Some, such as Icelandic and, to a lesser extent, German, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from Proto-Germanic (and in turn from Proto-Indo-European). Others, such as English, Swedish, and Afrikaans, have moved toward a largely analytic type.
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