The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the East Germanic languages. Derived from Proto-Norse and Old Norse, they are spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and (to some extent) Greenland, as well as by a significant Swedish minority in Finland and by immigrant groups mainly in North America and Australia. The language group is often called either Scandinavian or, today, less frequently in the English language, Nordic languages. The latter term is a direct translation from "nordiska språk", most commonly used by both scholars and laymen in the Nordic countries and is often favored by these when writing in English.
Often however the term Scandinavian (skandinavisk[a]) is used to designate merely the continental North Germanic languages, i.e. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, thus excluding Faroese and Icelandic. For example, in inter-Nordic contexts, texts may be labelled as either Finnish, Icelandic, or Scandinavian, where the latter will be written in either one of the three mutually comprehensible continental languages.

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