Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A subdivision of the Germanic languages that includes High German, Low German, Yiddish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Flemish, Frisian, and English.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun linguistics The branch of the Germanic language family consisting of English, Frisian languages, Dutch, Afrikaans, Low Saxon languages, German, and Yiddish, and their immediate predecessors.
  • proper noun The presumed unattested ancestor of these languages (more properly called Proto-West Germanic).
  • adjective Of or relating to these languages.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a branch of the Germanic languages

Etymologies

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Examples

  • But it was probably without much difficulty, given their close linguistic kinships, that the clusters of West Germanic languages sporadically evolved into what would become the earliest manifestations of English.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • But it was probably without much difficulty, given their close linguistic kinships, that the clusters of West Germanic languages sporadically evolved into what would become the earliest manifestations of English.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • What it instead indicates is that there were three "nodes", three centers of change, three wave sources, in the West Germanic dialect continuum: Ingvaeonic, Franconian, and German.

    The PIE and Pre-PIE pronominal system from the perspective of a wave model 2009

  • The tripartite division was East Germanic (Gothic and other extinct languages), West Germanic (German, Dutch, English), and North Germanic (Danish and the other Scandinavian languages.)

    languagehat.com: LOWLANDS LANGUAGES. 2004

  • Take a look at the definite article for instance, which is denoted by a suffix in the Scandinavian languages ("bord-et", "banan-en"), and only precedes nouns as a distinct word in the West Germanic manner when the nouns are qualified by adjectives ("det nye hus" instead of "huset").

    languagehat.com: LOWLANDS LANGUAGES. 2004

  • Sometimes they were East Germanic, and that was a grief, taking, as it were, the bloom from the guess that had made him great; and again they were West Germanic, and that was awful, the hallucination ending in a mortal struggle with the feather bed under which German science is incubated, and passing off with an anguished

    The Collectors Frank Jewett Mather

  • He dismissed the observation, however, as unworthy a philologer and went to sleep pondering a new destruction for the knaves who held the Lombard tongue to be not East but West Germanic.

    The Collectors Frank Jewett Mather

  • In the group of West Germanic dialects, for the study of which Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are our oldest and most valuable sources, we still have these four cases, but the phonetic form of the case syllables is already greatly reduced and in certain paradigms particular cases have coalesced.

    Chapter 7. Language as a Historical Product: Drift 1921

  • * Afrikaans is a West Germanic language descended from Dutch and spoken mainly in South Africa and Namibia.

    Glenwood Springs Post Independent - Top Stories Immigrant Stories Glenwood Springs 2010

  • Generally, the later development of the West Germanic language can be divided in two distinct lines of descent: Upper German, spoken in Central and Southern Germany, and Low German, spoken in Northern Germany.

    Conservapedia - Recent changes [en] 2009

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