German - Language Overview

Today, I'm going to start this new series about different languages. Each week, I will give an overview of one of the languages I speak (and maybe extend it to languages I don't yet speak later on). I will start with German as it is the first language I ever learnt. Watch out for English next week, followed by French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese (Mandarin) and Swedish for sure.

German

Geographical Extension

German is spoken in Germany and Austria as well as in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Belgium, some parts of Switzerland and even Namibia and northern Italy as official language. Brazil, the United States and some parts of France as well as many other countries have a huge population of German speakers as well although German is no official language there.

Spoken by

German is spoken by approximately 90 million native speakers.

Language Family and History

German belongs to the western Germanic languages. It is very close to Dutch and shares quite a few words with English and the Scandinavian languages as well. German has developed a whole bunch of dialects due to the fact that Germany was split in many independent parts throughout the Middle Ages. Some of the dialects, especially in northern Germany, are closer to Dutch than to German. The German language has been influenced by Latin, Greek, French, Jiddish, and lately English, and has quite a lot of foreign words from any of those languages included into the German vocabulary.

Grammar Difficulty

German grammar is difficult to learn for English native speakers. First of all, German has three different definite articles (male, female, neutral). Adjectives are changed due to gender and number of things they define and due to the case in which the noun stands. German knows a total of four cases, each of which comes with different endings. Word order and sentence structure can differ greatly from English sentences.

Pronunciation Difficulty

German can be tricky to pronounce for English native speakers as the German language has certain sounds which simply don't exist in English. Other than that, German isn't that difficult. Most combinations of letters only have one way, or two ways at most, to be pronounced so once you get the hang of pronunciation, you will be able to pronounce even unknown words.

Special Facts

German spelling and punctuation have been changed twice in the past decades. The last changes came into effect in 2006 and were a try to fix the mess they had made with the first changes. Even now, five years later, many Germans are confused by the old and new rules. Some things have been made more logic while others just lost all logic there might have been. Some newspapers even went back to use the old spelling and punctuation altogether.