Short answers, pulled from the story.
German has nearly 100 million native speakers and over 130 million total speakers as of 2024. It is the most spoken native language within the European Union and the second-most widely spoken Germanic language after English.
German is the majority and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. It is also an official language of Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Italian autonomous province of South Tyrol, and a recognised national language in Namibia.
The High German consonant shift was a drastic change in pronunciation during the Migration Period that separated Old High German dialects from Old Saxon. It changed voiceless and voiced stop consonants, for example turning word-initial /p/ into /pf/ and /t/ into /ss/ after a vowel.
Martin Luther translated the Bible into High German based primarily on the Meissner Deutsch of Saxony, publishing the New Testament in 1522 and completing the Old Testament in 1534. His Bible reached nearly every household and helped standardise German as a supra-dialectal written language.
German orthography capitalises nouns to make it easier for readers to determine a word's function within a sentence. The convention was once common across Northern Europe in the early modern era, but Danish abolished it in 1948 and English dropped it into the 1700s, leaving German nearly unique today.
The longest German word verified to be actually in use is Rindfleischetikettierungsuberwachungsaufgabenubertragungsgesetz, which translates literally as beef labelling supervision duties assignment law. Native speakers perceive such compounds as excessively bureaucratic or even satirical, though any of them could be expanded further.
German is spoken in Namibia, where about 30,000 people speak it natively, and in the Americas including the United States, Brazil, and Chile. In the United States it has over 1 million total speakers and is the most common home language after English in North Dakota and South Dakota.