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The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family, spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire. They are characterised by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law.
Some early Germanic languages developed runic alphabets of their own, but use of these alphabets was comparatively limited. East Germanic languages were written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible into Gothic. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic tongue began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters.
In addition to the standard Latin alphabet, various Germanic languages use a variety of accent marks and extra letters, including umlauts, the ß (Eszett), Ø, Æor ae is a vowel and a letter used in the Icelandic, Danish, Faroese and Norwegian alphabets. It was also used in Old English and in mediaeval and early modern Latin. Modern English still contains several words that use ae, such as Encyclopaedia but it is, ÅAlternative uses: the town A in Norway, the parish A in Sweden, symbol for angstrom, a noun meaning river in Scandinavian languages. or a is a letter, representing a vowel, in the Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Walloon and Chamorro alphabets. Other, Ð, YoghYogh is a letter used in Middle English and Middle Scots, representing y ( SAMPA /j/) and various velar phonemes. Velars are sounds that are usually made when the back of the tongue is pressed against the soft palate. They include the k in cat the g in gi, and Þ and wynnWynn is a letter in the old English alphabet that came from a rune (ᚹ) by the same name. It was used to represent the sound /w/. In written Old English and Middle English it was borrowed to represent the same sound, as the letter W was a later inve, from runes. Historic printed GermanGerman (called Deutsch in German in which germanisch refers to prechristian times), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and one of the world's major languages. It is the language with the most native speakers in the European Union. is frequently set in a distinctive typeface called FrakturThe German word Fraktur (pronounced /frak "tu:R\0/ in X-SAMPA) refers to a family of typefaces. The term derives from the past participle of Latin frangere ("to break"), fractus ("broken"). As opposed to Antiqua (common) typefaces, modelled after antique.