Languages
Native
German
95%
Secondary languages
English
56%
French
14%
Language Samples
Hallo, wie geht es dir?
Hello, how are you?
Mir geht es sehr gut, danke.
I am very well, thanks.
Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
German descends from Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of all Germanic languages. Old High German emerged around the 6th century, shaped by the consonant shifts that distinguish High German from its northern relatives. Martin Luther's 1522 Bible translation was a watershed moment — it standardised spelling and grammar across a politically fragmented region, effectively creating a written common language from dozens of dialects. Modern Standard German (Hochdeutsch) is largely built on that foundation, though the living dialects — Bavarian, Alemannic, Saxon, Low German — remain strikingly different from one another.
Similar Languages
Dutch
82%
Afrikaans
75%
English
60%
Swedish
60%
Media
The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin — symbol of German reunification
Photo: Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de · CC BY-SA 3.0
Sabbatical travels through today’s Germany
Did You Know
01
German has three grammatical genders — masculine, feminine, and neuter — and the gender of a word is often unpredictable. The word for 'girl' (Mädchen) is neuter.
02
German is famous for compound nouns. Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (63 letters) was a real law about beef labelling — it was repealed in 2013.
03
Around 130 million people speak German as a first language, making it the most widely spoken native language in the European Union.
04
The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz around 1440, was first used to print in German — accelerating both literacy and the standardisation of the language.