# German language
**German** (Deutsch) is a West Germanic language spoken by around 130 million people worldwide, and the commonly used language of Germany, Austria, and [Liechtenstein](https://www.edgepedia.org/liechtenstein) as well as one of the official languages of Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Belgium.[1](https://live.european-language-grid.eu/ncc/ncc-germany) Its written history begins in the eighth century, and its standard form, Standard High German (Standardhochdeutsch), emerged over roughly a millennium of regional written practices, chancery usage, and later codification.[2](https://adfontes.uzh.ch/tutorium/die-deutsche-sprache-in-den-quellen/die-sprachstufen-des-deutschen)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Family and branch | West Germanic, within the Indo-European family; one of the largest groups of Indo-European languages[1](https://live.european-language-grid.eu/ncc/ncc-germany) • [3](https://www.goethe.de/ins/ae/de/m/kul/sup/edl/ger.html) |
| Official status | Commonly used in Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein; one of the official languages of Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Belgium[1](https://live.european-language-grid.eu/ncc/ncc-germany) |
| Speakers | Around 130 million speakers worldwide[1](https://live.european-language-grid.eu/ncc/ncc-germany) |
| Historical periods | Old High German (750–1050), Middle High German (1050–1350), Early New High German (1350–1650), New High German (after 1650)[4](https://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/sprache-deutsch/sprachgeschichte.html) |
| Defining sound change | The High German consonant shift (second sound shift) in the early Middle Ages, which separates High German from Low German dialects[3](https://www.goethe.de/ins/ae/de/m/kul/sup/edl/ger.html) • [5](https://cdn-assetservice.ecom-api.beck-shop.de/product/other/28156/leseprobe_geschichte-der-deutschen-sprache.pdf) |
| Orthographic codification | Konrad Duden's dictionary of 1880, with about 27,000 words, laid the basis for unified German spelling; spelling reform proclaimed in 1996[6](https://www.duden.de/145-jahre-duden) • [3](https://www.goethe.de/ins/ae/de/m/kul/sup/edl/ger.html) |
| Home use in Germany | In 2024, 77% of the population in Germany spoke only German at home, 17% used German alongside other languages, and 6% spoke no German at home[7](https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Zahl-der-Woche/2026/PD26_08_p002.html) |
## Classification and defining features
German belongs to the West Germanic branch of Indo-European, alongside English and Dutch. The language that took shape in the second half of the first millennium shows several features that distinguish it from the other [Germanic languages](https://www.edgepedia.org/germanic-languages): vowel and consonant developments, above all the Second Sound Shift (Zweite Lautverschiebung); the development of the article from a pronoun; the emergence of periphrastic verb forms, for example for the passive and the future; the establishment of an independent written language; and, in poetry, the change from alliterative verse to end rhyme.[5](https://cdn-assetservice.ecom-api.beck-shop.de/product/other/28156/leseprobe_geschichte-der-deutschen-sprache.pdf) The history of the language is conventionally dated to begin with this High German consonant shift in the early Middle Ages.[3](https://www.goethe.de/ins/ae/de/m/kul/sup/edl/ger.html)
The sound shift defines the internal split of the German-speaking area. The dialects of the northern parts of the country, called [Low German](https://www.edgepedia.org/low-german) (Niederdeutsch, also Plattdeutsch), were not affected by the Second Sound Shift.[5](https://cdn-assetservice.ecom-api.beck-shop.de/product/other/28156/leseprobe_geschichte-der-deutschen-sprache.pdf) After 1650 the Low German written language was fully displaced by High German in northern Germany.[8](https://www.regionalgeschichte.net/rheinhessen/sprache/dialektatlas-rlp-saar/begriffe-dialektatlas-rlp-saar/exkurs-sprachgeschichte-dialekte/periodisierung-der-sprachgeschichte.html?L=0)
## Historical periods
Following the proposals of [Jacob Grimm](https://www.edgepedia.org/jacob-grimm) and Wilhelm Scherer, the history of German is divided into four stages: [Old High German](https://www.edgepedia.org/old-high-german), Middle High German, Early New High German, and New High German.[2](https://adfontes.uzh.ch/tutorium/die-deutsche-sprache-in-den-quellen/die-sprachstufen-des-deutschen) German-language texts are attested from the eighth century onward.[2](https://adfontes.uzh.ch/tutorium/die-deutsche-sprache-in-den-quellen/die-sprachstufen-des-deutschen)
**Old High German (750–1050).** Latin was the written language of the European Middle Ages. The earliest vernacular written records are translations from Latin or poems in the *theodisca lingua*, in regional forms such as Bavarian and [Old Saxon](https://www.edgepedia.org/old-saxon).[4](https://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/sprache-deutsch/sprachgeschichte.html)
**Middle High German (1050–1350).** With the [Holy Roman Empire](https://www.edgepedia.org/holy-roman-empire) a supraregional *diutsche* high language developed, and during a first cultural flowering an Upper German poetic language took shape. Middle High German, however, had no standardized spelling.[4](https://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/sprache-deutsch/sprachgeschichte.html) • [3](https://www.goethe.de/ins/ae/de/m/kul/sup/edl/ger.html)
**Early New High German (1350–1650).** The written language of the East Central German chanceries spread supraregionally as the language of the [Reformation](https://www.edgepedia.org/reformation) and led to the equal standing of German with Latin.[4](https://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/sprache-deutsch/sprachgeschichte.html) Until the emergence of a unified written language, the German language area was characterized by many different writing dialects and written languages: texts were regionally marked in sound, spelling, vocabulary, and syntax, and can thus be located geographically.[9](https://histadfontes03.uzh.ch/en/tutorium/die-deutsche-sprache-in-den-quellen/die-herausbildung-der-neuhochdeutschen-schriftsprache) In the German-speaking part of Switzerland this period is placed later, from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth century, because Alemannic literary and chancery traditions endured and German-language printing spread late outside Basel.[10](https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011194/2018-01-24/)
**New High German (after 1650).** Language societies promoted poetry, language research, and the formation of a unified High German norm; universities now also taught in German, and German studies (Germanistik) was founded.[4](https://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/sprache-deutsch/sprachgeschichte.html) In the eighteenth century, rule works such as Johann Christoph Gottsched's *Deutscher Sprachkunst* (1748) contributed to constituting the German standard or "Hochsprache", and Gottsched succeeded in standardizing the written language on the basis of Meissen usage.[11](https://www.waxmann.com/shop/download?cHash=e5fd58796c2396d1e4f1449b45578eee&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Baction%5D=download&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Bbuchnr%5D=4775&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Bcontroller%5D=Zeitschrift) • [12](https://www.philognosie.net/kommunikation/deutsche-sprachpflege-in-vergangenheit-und-gegenwart) Compared with other European standard languages, such as the [Romance languages](https://www.edgepedia.org/romance-languages), German took a lagging but lasting path toward standardization.[11](https://www.waxmann.com/shop/download?cHash=e5fd58796c2396d1e4f1449b45578eee&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Baction%5D=download&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Bbuchnr%5D=4775&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Bcontroller%5D=Zeitschrift)
## Standardization and orthography
**The Duden.** Konrad Duden, a schoolmaster who followed the phonetic principle "write as you speak", published his *Vollständiges Orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache* in 1880; with about 27,000 words, the "Urduden" laid the foundation for a unified [German orthography](https://www.edgepedia.org/german-orthography).[6](https://www.duden.de/145-jahre-duden) • [13](https://www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/konrad-duden) At a conference in Berlin in 1901, representatives of the German federal states and [Austria-Hungary](https://www.edgepedia.org/austria-hungary) agreed on a unified German orthography with Duden's dictionary as its basis, and in 1902 Duden's rules were made binding for all German federal states, with Austria-Hungary and Switzerland following.[13](https://www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/konrad-duden) After Germany's division, separate Duden editions appeared in West and East from 1947 until the "Einheitsduden" (20th edition) of 1991 reunited them.[6](https://www.duden.de/145-jahre-duden)
**The spelling reform of 1996.** The German standard orthography remained unchanged until 1998, after the spelling reform had been officially proclaimed in 1996 by government representatives of Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland.[3](https://www.goethe.de/ins/ae/de/m/kul/sup/edl/ger.html) The Rechtschreibduden was adapted to the new official orthography in 1996.[6](https://www.duden.de/145-jahre-duden) The 29th edition of the Rechtschreibduden appeared in 2024 with 3,000 new entries and about 151,000 keywords, more than ever before.[6](https://www.duden.de/145-jahre-duden)
**Digital lexicography.** The Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS), run by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, is a freely accessible lexical information system covering the German vocabulary in the present and the past; its dictionary covers about 270,000 entries, and its web platform gives access to text corpora of about 70 billion words.[14](https://www.bbaw.de/forschung/digitales-woerterbuch-der-deutschen-sprache)
## German today
German is the sole official language of Germany and tends strongly toward being the single language of public use there.[15](https://language-data-space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-10/ELRC-White-Paper%202022.pdf) According to [Eurobarometer](https://www.edgepedia.org/eurobarometer) survey data from 2024, 97.6% of the population in Germany speaks German, 89.8% as native speakers and 7.8% as foreign speakers.[16](https://languageknowledge.eu/countries/germany/languages/german) The Federal Statistical Office reported that in 2024 about 77% of the population in private households spoke only German at home, 17% were multilingual and used German alongside at least one other language, and 6% spoke no German at home; among multilingual households, Turkish (14% of the roughly 15.5 million people who mainly used a language other than German), Russian (12%), and Arabic (9%) were the most frequently spoken.[7](https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Zahl-der-Woche/2026/PD26_08_p002.html)
**Dialects remain in use.** More than 40% of the population in Germany speaks a regional dialect, according to figures cited by Adler and Hansen (2022).[17](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13835) [In Switzerland](https://www.edgepedia.org/in-switzerland), German is the primary language for more than 60% of the population, but in practice [Swiss German](https://www.edgepedia.org/swiss-german), a collection of Alemannic dialects, is the predominant spoken form, while standard German serves as the written form; Swiss German is also the most commonly used language in the Swiss workplace.[18](https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/language)
## Relation to other Germanic languages
Within continental West Germanic, German belongs to a dialect continuum that covers, approximately, the lands of present-day Germany, Austria, the German-speaking portion of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Flanders (the northern half of Belgium), Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and [South Tyrol](https://www.edgepedia.org/south-tyrol) in northern Italy.[19](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-of-germanic-linguistics/west-germanic-dialect-continuum/BB2DE0B12B5E05DAA5CD8BE92305FF98) In grammar-theoretic terms the label "dialect" is a sociolinguistic rather than a grammar-based distinction; Plattdeutsch, for example, is called a dialect of German although its grammar is much closer to Dutch than to standard German.[20](https://assets.cambridge.org/97810092/89450/excerpt/9781009289450_excerpt.pdf)
Mutual intelligibility with neighboring Germanic languages is limited and asymmetric. A large-scale study of Danish, Dutch, English, German, and Swedish found that Dutch and German are mutually intelligible to a low degree in spoken language and to a higher degree in written language.[21](https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/predicting-the-mutual-intelligibility-of-germanic-languages-from-/) In cloze tests (fill-in-the-blank comprehension tests), German listeners understood some Dutch, with 31% correct responses, and German is well understood by listeners from the North Germanic group because it is a school language in many Germanic countries.[22](https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/49613447/Mutual_intelligibility_between_closely_related_language.pdf) Exposure, an extra-linguistic factor, was the most significant predictor of intelligibility across the Germanic language area.[23](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/article/linguistic-and-extralinguistic-predictors-of-mutual-intelligibility-between-germanic-languages/65851C6257507D865362296D0FCFE02C)
## References
1. [National Competence Centre Germany, European Language Grid](https://live.european-language-grid.eu/ncc/ncc-germany)
2. [Die Sprachstufen des Deutschen, Ad fontes, Universität Zürich](https://adfontes.uzh.ch/tutorium/die-deutsche-sprache-in-den-quellen/die-sprachstufen-des-deutschen)
3. [Die Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Goethe-Institut](https://www.goethe.de/ins/ae/de/m/kul/sup/edl/ger.html)
4. [Sprachgeschichte, die SPRACHE DEUTSCH, Deutsches Historisches Museum](https://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/sprache-deutsch/sprachgeschichte.html)
5. [Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Leseprobe), C. H. Beck](https://cdn-assetservice.ecom-api.beck-shop.de/product/other/28156/leseprobe_geschichte-der-deutschen-sprache.pdf)
6. [145 Jahre Duden, Duden Verlag](https://www.duden.de/145-jahre-duden)
7. [77 % der Bevölkerung sprechen zu Hause ausschließlich Deutsch, Statistisches Bundesamt (2026)](https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Zahl-der-Woche/2026/PD26_08_p002.html)
8. [Periodisierung der Sprachgeschichte, regionalgeschichte.net](https://www.regionalgeschichte.net/rheinhessen/sprache/dialektatlas-rlp-saar/begriffe-dialektatlas-rlp-saar/exkurs-sprachgeschichte-dialekte/periodisierung-der-sprachgeschichte.html?L=0)
9. [Die Herausbildung der neuhochdeutschen Schriftsprache, Ad fontes, Universität Zürich](https://histadfontes03.uzh.ch/en/tutorium/die-deutsche-sprache-in-den-quellen/die-herausbildung-der-neuhochdeutschen-schriftsprache)
10. [Deutsch, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz](https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011194/2018-01-24/)
11. [Grundlagen der sprachlichen Bildung, Waxmann](https://www.waxmann.com/shop/download?cHash=e5fd58796c2396d1e4f1449b45578eee&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Baction%5D=download&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Bbuchnr%5D=4775&tx_p2waxmann_download%5Bcontroller%5D=Zeitschrift)
12. [Deutsche Sprachpflege in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Philognosie](https://www.philognosie.net/kommunikation/deutsche-sprachpflege-in-vergangenheit-und-gegenwart)
13. [Konrad Duden, LeMO Biografie, Deutsches Historisches Museum](https://www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/konrad-duden)
14. [Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften](https://www.bbaw.de/forschung/digitales-woerterbuch-der-deutschen-sprache)
15. [ELRC White Paper: Country Profile Germany, European Language Data Space](https://language-data-space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-10/ELRC-White-Paper%202022.pdf)
16. [language knowledge /eu: German in Germany](https://languageknowledge.eu/countries/germany/languages/german)
17. [Large Language Models Discriminate Against Speakers of German Dialects, arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13835)
18. [Language, About Switzerland, Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs](https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/language)
19. [The West Germanic Dialect Continuum, The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-of-germanic-linguistics/west-germanic-dialect-continuum/BB2DE0B12B5E05DAA5CD8BE92305FF98)
20. [Hubert Haider, The Syntax of German (excerpt), Cambridge University Press](https://assets.cambridge.org/97810092/89450/excerpt/9781009289450_excerpt.pdf)
21. [Predicting the mutual intelligibility of Germanic languages, University of Groningen research portal](https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/predicting-the-mutual-intelligibility-of-germanic-languages-from-/)
22. [Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe (cloze test table), University of Groningen](https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/49613447/Mutual_intelligibility_between_closely_related_language.pdf)
23. [Gooskens & Swarte, Linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors of mutual intelligibility between Germanic languages, Nordic Journal of Linguistics](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/article/linguistic-and-extralinguistic-predictors-of-mutual-intelligibility-between-germanic-languages/65851C6257507D865362296D0FCFE02C)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Languages and dialects › Named languages by region › Languages of Europe › Germanic languages of Europe*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license