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How are West Germanic languages related to the Indo-European language family?

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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. — West Germanic languages Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.

The West Germanic languages are a subgroup of the Germanic languages, which constitute one of the primary branches of the Indo-European language family.1

The relationship is defined by a shared ancestry: all Germanic languages, including the West Germanic group (such as English, German, and Dutch), are historical developments of a single, unrecorded parent language known as Proto-Germanic. By applying the comparative method to reconstruct this parent language, linguists have demonstrated that Germanic is, in turn, a subsequent development of an even earlier, reconstructed parent language called Proto-Indo-European.21

Consequently, West Germanic languages are related to other Indo-European branches—such as Celtic, Italic, Greek, Baltic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian—because they all descend from this common Proto-Indo-European source, which is believed to have been spoken around 4000 bce.21