Germanic Language

The Germanic Languages are:

German
Swiss German
Yiddish
Dutch,Flemish (Dutch and Flemish ("Vlaams") are the same language, although there are obvious regional differences)
Afrikaans (Descended from 17th century Dutch. It's very easy to read if you know Dutch.)
Frisian
Danish
Faroese
Icelandic
Norwegian
Swedish
English
Scots
...?

But not

Welsh
any kind of Gaelic
RomanceLanguages
SlavonicLanguage?s
AnatolianLanguage?s
IndianLanguage?s
All non IndoEuropeanLanguages
any other non-GermanicLanguages
- well, I wouldn't think so! :)
PrussianLanguage
Most constructed languages
- Ah, but the Germanic roots of KlingonLanguage are apparent... :)

"Scots" above refers to the language of Burns. This is influcenced by but quite different from Scots Gaelic.

English grammar is primarily derived from the Anglo-Saxon, and thus is Germanic, although much English vocabulary comes from the RomanceLanguages (and others).

Primarily is rather strong here. The influence of Latin grammar is equal to or greater than that of Anglo-Saxon in modern English. The Latin influence was especially strong in the 18th century because Latin was considered to be "superior" to the vernacular.

Am I right in thinking that Basque and Finnish are not even IndoEuropeanLanguages, let alone Germanic or Romance?

It seems you are. http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/families/Uralic.html identifies Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian (along with a lot of Siberian and Asian languages, some with very few surving speakers) as UralicLanguage?s. The Basque languages appear to be unrelated to any other known language.

Actually there are those who have found parallels between BasqueLanguage? and some IndoEuropeanLanguages, but I'd say that's just a case of ancient fu'ivla

Some say basque is related to Pictish, but since we don't know what any of those Pictish inscriptions say we'll probably never know.

Aren't Danish and Norwegian essentially the same language?

CategoryNaturalLanguage