German Language

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:

    “I don’t want to shoot any Englishmen. I never saw one ‘til I came up here. But I suppose most of them never saw a German ‘til they came up here.”
    —Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959)

    “The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.”
    —Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)