Introduction to German:
German (German: Deutsch；; English: German belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family of Indo-European languages. Its standard form is called Standard German, which is the official language of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Belgium, Luxemburg and Porzano, Italy, and is written in Latin alphabet.
The number of people who use German accounts for about 3% of the world population, ranking sixth in the world in terms of the number of countries that use German. It is also one of the languages of major countries in the world and the most widely used mother tongue in the European Union.
Basic information:
According to the data of the European Language Management Center in September of 20 15, there are nearly1770,000 people using German dialects and German learners in the world, including 95 million native speakers, 20,000 second language users and 70 million foreign language learners, making it one of the most frequently learned foreign languages in the world. The formation of German standard homonyms can be traced back to Martin Luther's translation of the Latin Bible.
Most German words come from Indo-European Germanic languages, some from Latin and Greek, and some from French and English. There is a huge gap between German dialects, including dozens of dialects of the two branches of Highland German and Low German. Vocabulary and grammar are different, so we can't communicate with each other.
Highland German is distributed in the Alps and adjacent mountainous areas in southern Germany, while low German is mainly distributed in the coastal areas of northern Germany. Lower German is usually divided into East Lower German, Lower Saxon and Lower Frankish. The word Hochdeutsch in German is usually used to refer to standard German, not the dialect of Highland German.
Historical evolution:
The word German first appeared in the early Middle Ages. Its root comes from the Germanic word people's thioda and the adjective thiodisk, which means the language used by ordinary people and civilians. In contrast, Frank Latin was widely used by the upper class of Franks, and later evolved into French.
At that time, German was not a unified language, but a general term for many local dialects. During the Middle Ages, the development of German dialects was very different because of the feudal lords' separatist regime and inconvenient transportation.
Although attempts have been made to establish the same language, it is generally limited to various regions and only used by certain classes. For example, the low German in North Germany became the common language of local businesses in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea during the heyday of the Hanseatic League.