A Roman label repurposed by 19th-century linguists to name the family linking English, German, and Norse.
A branch of the Indo-European language family that includes English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages; also used as an adjective describing the peoples, cultures, and languages of this group.
From Latin 'Germānicus,' the adjectival form of 'Germānus,' the name the Romans gave to the peoples east of the Rhine. Julius Caesar popularized the ethnonym in 'De Bello Gallico' (58–50 BCE), though it may have been a Gaulish exonym. The ultimate origin is debated: proposals include Celtic *gair (neighbor) or *garm (war cry), or a native Germanic self-designation. The linguistic sense — 'Germanic' as the name for a language family — was established
The Romans never used 'Germani' as a linguistic classification — they had no concept of language families. It was Jacob Grimm in the 1820s who repurposed the ancient ethnonym for his revolutionary discovery that English, German, Gothic, and the Scandinavian languages all descended from a single ancestor language, now called Proto-Germanic.