left: North Germanic languages
Blue - Continental North Germanic languages
Green - Insular North Germanic languages

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, ie Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, thus excluding Faeroese 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.

The North Germanic languages are often cited as proof of the aphorism "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." The differences in dialects within the countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark can often be greater than the differences across the borders, but the political independence of these countries leads continental Scandinavian to be classified into Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish in the popular mind as well as among most linguists. This is also because of the strong influence of the standard languages, particularly in Denmark and Sweden. Even if the language policy of Norway has been more tolerant of rural dialectal variation in formal language, the prestige dialect often referred to as "Eastern Urban Norwegian", spoken mainly in and around the Oslo-region, can be considered to be quite normative. The creation of Nynorsk out of dialects after Norway became independent of Denmark in 1814 was an attempt to make the linguistic divisions match the political ones.

All North Germanic languages are descended from Old Norse. Divisions between subfamilies of North Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form continuous clines, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and the most separated ones not.

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