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How are English and German related?

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Thematic map of Europe displaying the distribution of Germanic languages, with different colors indicating regions where English, German, Netherlandic (Dutch), Frisian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese are spoken. Striped areas mark regions where bilingualism is common, and language regions cover countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and parts of surrounding countries. — Germanic languages Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.

English and German are related because they both belong to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. They share a common ancestry, descending from a single, unrecorded parent language known as Proto-Germanic.12

While they share this historical foundation, the two languages have diverged significantly over time. A primary difference lies in their grammatical structure:3
* Inflections: German remains a more conservative, synthetic language, retaining an elaborate system of inflections, including four noun cases and complex verb forms.432
* Analytic structure: Modern English has evolved into a relatively uninflected, analytic language, relying more heavily on word order and prepositions to convey meaning.43

Despite these differences, they remain part of the same linguistic lineage, with Frisian being the language most closely related to English.42