Everything there is to know about the official language of Germany
BlogLanguagesGermanEverything you need to know about German: Everything there is to know about the official language of Germany
Index
Discover the fabulous history of the German language
German, a Germanic language
German culture
Would you pass the naturalization test?
The ten most influential German figures
The most important writers of German literature
Did you know that German is the most widely spoken language in Europe? With more than 100 million speakers worldwide, German even surpasses English in the European Union.
If you have decided to take German courses online or want to go live in Germany, you must also take an interest in German culture.
How to discover the German language to go to live in Germany?: Everything there is to know about the official language of Germany
Language and culture go hand in hand, and to know the history of Germany and its origins is to know an important part of German culture.
If you want to be bilingual or study at a German university, there are a few things you should know. What are the origins of German? How has it evolved over time? What are their characteristics? And the most important German figures?
Discover with us everything there is to know about Goethe’s language!
Discover the fabulous history of the German language
What is the history of the German language ?
Around 1200 BC, the ancestors of the Germans occupied the peninsula of present-day Denmark. They spoke a language from the Indo-European dialect that mixed Latin, Celtic and Sanskrit.
At this moment the history of the German begins. This German language consisted of several dialects: Gothic (dead language since the 4th century), Anglo-French (Dutch, Flemish …) and the Nordic languages (Icelandic, Norwegian …). The first sound change takes place .
The second took place between the 4th and 8th centuries and led to a phonetic modification of the consonants of the so-called Old High German lexicon. Grimm’s law , a famous German philologist, was able to discover these changes.
The term “German” appears for the first time in a document dating from 786.
In the Middle Ages, German was made up of various dialects.
However, there was no unified language during the Middle Ages, rather German was a set of various dialects.
From 1050 onwards, historians and scientists find documents in German, considered to be the first vestiges of Middle High German, which is the “official” ancestor of present-day German. Like Old High German, it is made up of many local dialects.
However, there is a big difference between the two languages, because Latin was the written language during the 10th and 11th centuries.
Standard German will make its appearance through the Protestant religion. In fact, when Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in 1520, the population of the country began to speak German.
From the 19th century on, it became the language of commerce par excellence. Although the Austro-Hungarian Empire reigns in Central Europe, German is spoken in Budapest, Prague or Bratislava.
The Brothers Grimm dictionary is the first to bring together the German vocabulary.
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German, a Germanic language
What are the characteristics of German ?
Surely you have noticed that German has some similarities with our mother tongue, but also with English, Persian, Swedish …
This is because, although German is a Germanic language, it belongs to the Indo-European family, from which most of the languages of Europe that are spoken today arose.
With time and conquests, Indo-European divided into several branches, such as the Germanic family to which German belongs. Also, there are some similarities between the Germanic languages.
German resembles English in some ways. First of all, the phonetics are sometimes similar; the tonic accent, for example, which consists of emphasizing a particular syllable, is common to both languages. Second, the German conjugation also has some similarities to that of English, such as the division of verbs into strong and weak, equivalent to regular and irregular verbs in English.
However, German has some characteristics of its own :
In German, sentences are constructed backwards.
The declensions are also a peculiarity of German, essential to understand the language.
German is also known for its precision – Germans have a word for everything! You may not find an exact translation when you look up a word in the dictionary. For example, in German a Geisterfahrer is a conductor going in the opposite direction. Why isn’t there a word in Spanish for that?
