Search results
2 days ago · YouTube, social media platform and website for sharing videos. It was registered on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal. They had the idea that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their “home videos.”
- William L. Hosch
- Overview
- High German (Hochdeutsch)
- Low German (Plattdeutsch, or Niederdeutsch)
- Other major dialects
German language, official language of both Germany and Austria and one of the official languages of Switzerland. German belongs to the West Germanic group of the Indo-European language family, along with English, Frisian, and Dutch (Netherlandic, Flemish).
The recorded history of Germanic languages begins with their speakers’ first contact with the Romans, in the 1st century bce. At that time and for several centuries thereafter, there was only a single “Germanic” language, with little more than minor dialect differences. Only after about the 6th century ce can one speak of a “German” (i.e., High German) language.
Britannica Quiz
Languages & Alphabets
German is an inflected language with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and strong and weak verbs. Altogether, German is the native language of more than 90 million speakers and thus ranks among the languages with the most native speakers worldwide. German is widely studied as a foreign language and is one of the main cultural languages of the Western world.
As a written language, German is quite uniform; it differs in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland no more than written English does in the United States and the British Commonwealth. As a spoken language, however, German exists in many dialects, most of which belong to either the High German or Low German dialectal groups. The main difference between High and Low German is in the sound system, especially in the consonants. High German, the language of the southern highlands of Germany, is the official written language.
Old High German, a group of dialects for which there was no standard literary language, was spoken until about 1100 in the highlands of southern Germany. During Middle High German times (after 1100), a standard language based on the Upper German dialects (Alemannic and Bavarian) in the southernmost part of the German speech area began to arise. Middle High German was the language of an extensive literature that includes the early 13th-century epic Nibelungenlied.
Modern standard High German is descended from the Middle High German dialects and is spoken in the central and southern highlands of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It is used as the language of administration, higher education, literature, and the mass media in the Low German speech area as well. Standard High German is based on, but not identical with, the Middle German dialect used by Martin Luther in his 16th-century translation of the Bible. Within the modern High German speech area, Middle and Upper German dialect groups are differentiated, the latter group including Austro-Bavarian, Alemannic (Swiss German), and High Franconian.
Special offer for students! Check out our special academic rate and excel this spring semester!
Learn More
Low German, with no single modern literary standard, is the spoken language of the lowlands of northern Germany. It developed from Old Saxon and the Middle Low German speech of the citizens of the Hanseatic League. The language supplied the Scandinavian languages with many loanwords, but, with the decline of the league, Low German declined as well.
Although the numerous Low German dialects are still spoken in the homes of northern Germany and a small amount of literature is written in them, no standard Low German literary or administrative language exists.
Alemannic dialects, which developed in the southwestern part of the Germanic speech area, differ considerably in sound system and grammar from standard High German. These dialects are spoken in Switzerland, western Austria, Swabia, and Liechtenstein and in the Alsace region of France. Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazic Jews (Jews whose ancesto...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Germany. Germanic peoples occupied much of the present-day territory of Germany in ancient times. The Germanic peoples are those who spoke one of the Germanic languages, and they thus originated as a group with the so-called first sound shift ( Grimm’s law ), which turned a Proto-Indo-European dialect into a new Proto-Germanic language within ...
Apr 19, 2024 · Wikipedia, free Internet-based encyclopedia, started in 2001, that operates under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation and is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet. It uses a collaborative software known as wiki for editing articles.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
2 days ago · Germany. One of Europe ’s largest countries, Germany encompasses a wide variety of landscapes: the tall, sheer mountains of the south; the sandy, rolling plains of the north; the forested hills of the urbanized west; and the plains of the agricultural east. At the spiritual heart of the country is the magnificent east-central city of Berlin ...
May 2, 2024 · Marlene Dietrich, German American motion-picture actress whose beauty, voice, aura of sophistication, and languid sensuality made her one of the world’s most glamorous film stars and best-known celebrities. Learn more about Dietrich’s life, movies, and songs in this article.
Apr 11, 2024 · Walter G. Bergmann. Georg Philipp Telemann was a German composer of the late Baroque period, who wrote both sacred and secular music but was most admired for his church compositions, which ranged from small cantatas to large-scale works for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. Telemann was the son of a Protestant minister.
