Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North ( Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish), and West ( German, Dutch, Frisian, and English). The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Indo-European languages in contemporary EurasiaĮnglish belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.
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