German language

• 1. Introduction

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  German, or Deutsch, is a West Germanic language with nearly 100 million native speakers and over 130 million total speakers as of 2024. It is the majority or official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. Few languages can claim a single word as long as Rindfleischetikettierungsuberwachungsaufgabenubertragungsgesetz. Translated literally, it means beef labelling supervision duties assignment law. That word, verified to be actually in use, hints at a language built for assembly, where nouns lock together without spaces and every one of them takes a capital letter. How did a tongue once scattered across mutually incomprehensible dialects become the most spoken native language within the European Union? Who decided which regional speech would become the standard, and which would be dismissed as mere dialect? The answers run through monasteries, a translator obsessed with how mothers spoke at home, and a confederation of northern ports that lost its language to history.

• 2. The Consonant Shift

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  A drastic change in pronunciation, the High German consonant shift, separated Old High German dialects from Old Saxon during the Migration Period. Voiceless stops like p, t, and k transformed depending on where they sat in a word. Following a vowel they stretched into long fricatives, so /t/ became /ss/. In word-initial position they became affricates, turning /p/ into /pf/. Voiced stops hardened too, with /d/ becoming /t/ in certain settings. Two invisible lines drawn across the map decide who underwent this shift and who did not. The Benrath and Uerdingen lines run through Dusseldorf-Benrath and Krefeld-Uerdingen. Dialects south of Benrath are grouped as High German, while those north of Uerdingen are the Low German and Low Franconian dialects. The Uerdingen line carries a small giveaway: north of it the word for I is pronounced ik, and south of it, ich. These groupings have older names. High German, Low German, and Low Franconian descend from dialects spoken by the Irminones, the Ingvaeones, and the Istvaeones, also known as the Elbe, North Sea, and Weser-Rhine groups.

• 3. Monks And Manuscripts

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  The Abrogans, written around 765 to 775, is generally seen as the beginning of the Old High German period. It was a Latin-German glossary supplying over 3,000 Old High German words with their Latin equivalents. Coherent works followed in the ninth century. The Hildebrandslied is a secular epic telling of an estranged father and son who unknowingly meet each other in battle. Scholars prize it for its mixed use of Old Saxon and Old High German dialects in a single text. The Muspilli, a Christian poem in a Bavarian dialect, describes the soul after the Last Judgment, while the Merseburg charms transcribe spells from the pagan Germanic tradition. Latin dominated the places where writing happened. The early tradition of Old High German survived mostly through monasteries and scriptoria as local translations of Latin originals. As a result, surviving texts appear in highly disparate regional dialects and carry significant Latin influence, especially in vocabulary. German itself saw only occasional use in official and ecclesiastical writing. The writers of this period came mainly from the Alamanni, Bavarian, and Thuringian groups, all part of the Elbe Germanic group that had settled in southern-central Germany and Austria during the great migration.

• 4. Courts And Conquest

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  Between 1050 and 1350, the Middle High German period, Germanic tribes pushed east beyond the Elbe and Saale rivers into Slavic territory, a movement known as the Ostsiedlung. More speakers and more wealth meant German appeared more often in the courts of nobles as the standard language of official proceedings. The Hohenstaufen court in Swabia employed a standardised supra-dialectal written language, the mittelhochdeutsche Dichtersprache. Vowel sounds were drifting during these centuries. The Old High German hus diphthongised toward haus and eventually the modern Haus, while unstressed short vowels weakened to a schwa, so taga became tage. Secular literature flourished. The Nibelungenlied tells the story of the dragon-slayer Siegfried, dated to around the thirteenth century. Hartmann von Aue wrote the Arthurian verse poem Iwein around 1203, and the courtly romances Parzival and Tristan also survive. The first book of laws written in Middle Low German, the Sachsenspiegel, dates to around 1220. The Middle High German period is generally seen as ending when the Black Death of 1346 to 1353 decimated Europe's population.

• 5. Luther's Bible

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  One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it, Martin Luther insisted; he must ask the mother in the home, the children on the streets, the common man in the market-place. Luther based his translation primarily on the Meissner Deutsch of Saxony, spending much time among the population researching the dialect. His New Testament appeared in 1522, and the Old Testament was completed in 1534. Wilhelm Scherer dates the Early New High German period from 1350 to 1650, ending with the Thirty Years' War. The German states remained part of the Holy Roman Empire, far from any unification, yet the desire for a written language understandable across many principalities grew stronger than ever. The printing press, invented around 1440, gave that desire a tool. Printers developed languages called Druckersprachen, aimed at making printed material readable across as many dialects as possible. Luther's Bible reached nearly every household. Copies featured long lists of glosses translating unfamiliar words into regional dialects. Even so, a widely accepted standard for written German did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century.

• 6. Language Of Empire

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  Until the mid-nineteenth century, German was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Habsburg Empire, which covered a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Speaking it marked a person as a merchant or city dweller, regardless of nationality. Prague had held a large German-speaking population since the Middle Ages, and Pressburg, now Bratislava, was settled by Germans in the 10th century. Cities like Zagreb and Ljubljana contained significant German minorities under Habsburg rule. In the eastern provinces of Banat, Bukovina, and Transylvania, German predominated not only in larger towns like Temeschburg, Hermannstadt, and Kronstadt, but also in many smaller surrounding localities. The twentieth century redrew these maps sharply. The Oder-Neisse line and the postwar expulsions shrank the German Sprachraum, and the large German-speaking areas of Bohemia and Moravia dissolved. Former exclaves of East Prussia, the Free City of Danzig, and the Memelland ceased to exist. Today small German minorities remain across the region. Around 8,000 members of the German minority still live in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

• 7. German Abroad

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  Namibia was a colony of the German Empire from 1884 to 1915, and about 30,000 people there still speak German as a native tongue, mostly descendants of colonial settlers. It is the only German-speaking country outside the European Sprachraum. The Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Namibia's three biggest newspapers, is the only German-language daily in Africa. German colonialism there also produced a pidgin called Namibian Black German, now nearly extinct. Across the Atlantic, German left its mark on place names. In the United States it is the fifth most spoken language with over 1 million total speakers, and in North Dakota and South Dakota it is the most common language spoken at home after English. Bismarck, North Dakota's state capital, and New Ulm carry that legacy, alongside varieties like Pennsylvania Dutch and Texas German. South America holds its own pockets. In Brazil, the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Espirito Santo hold the largest concentrations, and the dialect Riograndenser Hunsruckisch developed there. In southern Chile, German immigration made Valdivia a Spanish-German bilingual city for a time, with German signboards alongside the Spanish. In Australia, Prussian immigration to South Australia in the 1840s produced Barossa German, spoken in the Barossa Valley near Adelaide until anti-German sentiment during World War I drove it into sharp decline.

• 8. Capitals And Cases

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  Nouns are capitalised in German orthography, a convention almost unique to the language today, making it easier for readers to determine a word's function within a sentence. The practice was once common across Northern Europe in the early modern era. Danish abolished the capitalisation of nouns in 1948, and English carried it into the 1700s. The letter ss has its own long story. Before the orthography reform of 1996, ss replaced ss after long vowels, diphthongs, and before certain consonants. Because no traditional capital form existed, Massband became MASSBAND when written in capitals. A capital ss was finally adopted into German orthography in 2017, ending a long debate. Grammar carries the real weight. German nouns inflect by case, gender, and number, with four cases, three genders, and two numbers. With four cases and three genders plus plural, there are 16 permutations of case and gender, yet only six forms of the definite article cover all of them. Verbs split apart and reassemble. A separable prefix moves to the end of a clause, so mitgehen becomes Gehen Sie mit, and several clauses may sit between a prefix and its complement. The Deutsches Worterbuch, initiated by the Brothers Grimm, already contained over 330,000 headwords in its first edition, while modern German scientific vocabulary is estimated at nine million words and word groups.