German

The Germanic peoples are a historical group of Indo-European-speaking peoples, originating in Northern Europe and identified by their use of the Germanic languages which diversified out of Common Germanic in the course of the Pre-Roman Iron Age. The Germanic-speaking peoples of the Roman Iron Age and the Migration Period display a uniform material culture and common religious beliefs, even though recent scholarship has contested the existence of a distinct Germanic ethnicity.

Migrating Germanic peoples spread throughout Europe in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Germanic languages became dominant along the Roman borders (Austria, Germany, Netherlands, and England), but in the rest of the (western) Roman provinces, the Germanic immigrants adopted Latin (Romance) dialects. Furthermore, all Germanic peoples eventually converted to Christianity. The Germanic people played an important role in transforming the Roman empire into Medieval Europe, and they contributed in developing a common identity, history, and culture which transgressed the linguistic borders.

-- Wikipedia