Germanic parent language

The Germanic parent language (GPL), also known as Pre-Germanic Indo-European (PreGmc) or Pre-Proto-Germanic (PPG), is the stage of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family that was spoken c. 2500 BC – c. 500 BC, after the branch had diverged from Proto-Indo-European but before it evolved into Proto-Germanic during the First Germanic Sound Shift.

The less precise term Germanic, which appears in etymologies, dictionaries, etc., loosely refers to a language spoken in the 1st millennium AD,^{[citation needed]} proposedly at that time developing into the group of Germanic languages—a stricter term for that same proposition, but with an alternative chronography, is Proto-Germanic language.

As an identifiable neologism, Germanic parent language appears to have been first used by Frans Van Coetsem in 1994. It also makes appearances in the works of Elżbieta Adamczyk, Jonathan Slocum, and Winfred P. Lehmann.^{[citation needed]}