North Germanic

A subdivision of the Germanic languages that includes Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, and Faroese. Also called Norse, Scandinavian.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

North Germanic

(Languages) a subbranch of the Germanic languages that consists of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and their associated dialects. See also Old Norse

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

North′ German′ic

the branch of Germanic that includes Old Norse, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faeroese, and Icelandic.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

North Germanic - the northern family of Germanic languages that are spoken in Scandinavia and Iceland

Nordic, North Germanic language, Scandinavian language, Scandinavian, Norse

Germanic, Germanic language - a branch of the Indo-European family of languages; members that are spoken currently fall into two major groups: Scandinavian and West Germanic

Danish - a Scandinavian language that is the official language of Denmark

Icelandic - a Scandinavian language that is the official language of Iceland

Norwegian - a Scandinavian language that is spoken in Norway

Swedish - a Scandinavian language that is the official language of Sweden and one of two official languages of Finland

Faeroese, Faroese - a Scandinavian language (closely related to Icelandic) that is spoken on the Faroe Islands

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References in periodicals archive

The Meters of Old Norse Eddic Poetry: Common Germanic Inheritance and North Germanic Innovation

According to popular perception, the Vikings are believed to be seafaring North Germanic people, who raided, traded, explored, and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia, and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries, and wore horned helmets.

Vikings not as gory as believed

Decline of island tongue NORN is an extinct North Germanic language that was spoken in the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland and in Caithness, in the far north of the Scottish mainland.

Rare book to boost charity shop coffers; Dictionary for extinct Shetland language handed in

Little vignettes, such as the description of Jamieson's friendship with Grimur Thorkelin, the Icelandic-Danish professor most famous in the English-speaking world for his transcriptions of Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems, as well as helping to explain what is, perhaps, the most unusual feature of the Dictionary's apparatus: the belief that Scots is what we would now term a North Germanic language and therefore not a particularly close relative of English.

Jamieson's Dictionary of Scots: The Story of the First Historical Dictionary of the Scots Language

The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages.

The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages