German

German is a Western Germanic language that is spoken in Germany, Austria, several Swiss cantons, Alsace-Lorraine (France), South Tyrol (Italy), eastern Belgium and in Liechtenstein. There are also German speaking minorities in Romania and southern Denmark. In Luxemburg a dialect of German is spoken that is generally considered a separate language. But German is often used as a written language there along with French, which is the official language. German itself is the official language of Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and in the above-mentioned Swiss cantons. It is also officially recognized in South Tyrol and the German speaking parts of Belgium and Denmark.

Once there were also German speaking areas in what is now Poland, the Czech Republic and even in the Russian exclave Kaliningrad (between Polland, Lithuania and the Baltic) but after World War II most of the ethnic Germans were deported to present-day Germany.

There are in fact many dialects of German, often so different from the standard language that from a linguistic viewpoint they might be considered separate languages (sometimes with dialects of their own). The main division is between High German (in a more narrow sense the designation for Standard German) and Low German. The latter is spoken in the lowlands of the north and the term Low Saxon is sometimes applied to it when viewed as a separate language (which is also spoken in some eastern regions of the Netherlands). Low Saxon has recently been granted some official recognition in both the Netherlands and Germany, but its use as a written language is hampered by the lack of a widely accepted standard orthography and the existence of many dialects (which form an almost continuous spectrum between Standard Dutch and Standard German).

The High German dialects are those forms of German in which the so-called Second Sound Shift took place, resulting in the change of certain consonants. The following table illustrates this sound shift by comparing words from English, Dutch and Frisian with their equivalents in High German.

English	Dutch	Frisian	German
P to PF
pound	pond	pûn	Pfund
pipe	pijp	piip	Pfeife
P to F
thorpe	dorp	doarp	Dorf
open	open	iepen	offen
T to SS
eat	eten	ite	essen
let	laten	litte	lassen
T to (T)Z (pronounced as ts)
to(o)	te	te	zu
tell	vertellen	fertelle	erzählen
K to CH (a guttural as in Schottish loch)
book	boek	boek	Buch
break	breken	brekke	brechen

Two important dialects of High German are Bavarian and Swiss German. These tongues are almost completely unintelligable for a speaker of Standard German. To illustrate this I shall give a few examples of Bavarian words here.

English	Bavarian	Standard German
apple	ebbfe	Apfel
sheet	zuadeggn	Bettlaken
strawberry	eabbean	Erdbeere
towel	handduach	Handtuch
nut	niss	Nuß
salt	soiz	Salz
wild boar	wuidsau	Wildschwein

The fact that the part of Europe that is now called Germany has been a collection of many more or less independant bishoprics, counties, duchies, electorates and free towns has had a profound influence on the development (or rather the lack of it) of a standard language. In Britain the standard language grew out of the dialect of London, in France it was the dialect of Paris, but Germany did never have one dominant cultural centre. Standard German can be considered the creation of Martin Luther who naturally used his own dialect (he hailed from Thuringia) for his German translation of the Bible. As a result of the invention of the art of printing and the spread of Protestantism this dialect gradually became the norm, first for the written and later for the spoken language as well, even in German speaking areas that remained Roman Catholic. But even today there are regional differences of the "Standard" Language. For example, a potato is called Kartoffel in Berlin and Erdapfel in Vienna.

Prior to World War II German was usually written in a variant of the Latin script dating from the 14th century, the so-called Gothic style. From this script came the German sz ligature ß which is in certain cases used for ss. A curious phenomenon in written German is that all nouns start with a capital letter.