German Language
German (Deutsch ) is a West Germanic language related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union.
Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. A number of words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer from French and English.
German is written using the Latin alphabet. In addition to the 26 standard letters, German has three vowels with umlauts (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, and Ü/ü) and the letter ß.
Read more about German Language: Geographic Distribution, Standard German, Dialects, Grammar, Vocabulary, Orthography, Literature, German Loanwords in The English Language
Famous quotes containing the words german and/or language:
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Whether we regard the Women’s Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a movement that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.”
—Arianna Stassinopoulos (b. 1950)