Facts About The German Language
A cluster of allied or related languages together forms a family of languages. It is found that all languages have evolved from a common historic predecessor, known as protolanguage, which forms the root of the language family tree and the modern languages, known worldwide presently are the branches. Interestingly like any other family, all the languages within a particular family, have certain common traits and some individual differences which joins the language to its roots, yet making it distinct.
A fascinating reality which has surfaced from unearthing this history of protolanguages is that German and English are actually quite close relatives! They both belong to the same family of Proto- Indo-European languages, comprising of 3 branches of language families, i.e. Germanic languages, Romanic languages and Slavic languages, and the units of:
- Germanic languages are Dutch, Danish, German, Swedish and English.
- Romanic Languages are Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese
- Slavic languages are Russian, Polish and Czech.
Similarities
Many similar or like features may be seen amongst members of these families, for example, comparison may be made by looking at the word ‘water ’. In the languages, belonging to the Romanic family: water is aqua in Italian and agua in Spanish and Portuguese. In languages belonging to Slavic family: water is woda in Polish, and voda in Russian and Czech. While in the family of Germanic Languages: water is wasser in German, water in English and vand in Danish.
A close association can be seen between a lot of words of German and English, like there are plenty of words in German that have different spellings, but are pronounced in the same way as in English, like house is “Haus” in German and supermarket is “Supermarkt” in German. The local dialect versions spoken in the Northern Germany which is the closest to England, in fact have many German words sounding similar to English words.
Popularity
After English, the second most popular is the Germanic language spoken around the world. It is spoken approximately by 100 million people all over the world and is the official language for many countries like, Germany, East-Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, Switzerland and northern Italy. German language also boasts of being one of the three most learned languages in the world and one of the five commonly used languages on the internet.
The History
Traditionally, the German language followed the Gothic script known as Fraktur, but since 1945, the Roman script used throughout Europe, superseded and the use of Fraktur declined. Around the thirteenth century, the standard German language developed gradually from Old High German (mostly spoken by monks an aristocrats) to Middle High German to “Hochdeutsch” (High German), which is the standard German followed and understood everywhere.
In German language the easy way for pronouncing the words is to sound every letter. Again, an interesting fact in the grammar of German language is that, everything has a gender and there are 3 genders. Everything is either a male, female or has a neuter gender, meaning that it is something which is neutral. Hence there are 3 articles, der for male, die for female, and das for neuter gender. For instance, spoon is “der Loffel” (male), fork is “die Gabel” (female) and knife is “das Messer” (neuter).
The Duden Handbook was the first book of grammar and orthographic rules, printed in 1880, which was declared as the standard definition of the German language, in 1905. Although a spelling reform has been put forward, the traditional and the reformed spellings still co-exist Lastly, another intriguing fact is that after the American war of independence, when a new language was voted for the future language of United States, English won over German as the language of the newly formed United States by just one vote!
