German Language

Pennsylvania Dutch (also called Pennsylvania German) is spoken in the United States and Canada. It evolved from the languages of German settlers in Pennsylvania, incorporating a mixture of several German dialects (mainly Rhine-Franconian) with some English influences. Hutterite German, or Tirolean, is spoken in western Canada and small areas in the United States. The Hutterites originated in Tirol, Austria, and are linked through their common religion. Speakers are usually bilingual in at least Standard German. Plautdietsch, a Low German language different to Low Saxon but sometimes called Low German, is spoken primarily in Canada and also in some South American countries, Germany, the United States, and Belize. Many of the South American speakers are monolingual, while those in Canada, Germany, and the United States tend to be bilingual in either Standard German or English. In Venezuela, Colonia Tovar German (or Alemán Coloneiro), which originated from mid-19th-century Alemannic and other south German dialects, is spoken by a minority.

Until the middle of the 14th century Latin was the official written language of the Holy Roman Empire, which comprised most of the German-speaking regions of present-day Europe. During the reign (1314-1347) of Louis IV, Holy Roman emperor, German was adopted as the language of official court documents. Between 1480 and 1500 it was introduced for official use in many municipalities and courts of Saxony and Meissen and was adopted also by the universities of Leipzig and Wittenberg. By 1500 German had become generally accepted as the official language of all parts of Saxony and Thuringia and was the written language of the educated classes. In addition the publication of books in German increased in the East Middle German towns of Wittenberg, Erfurt, and Leipzig, as well as in such western and south-western cities as Mainz, Strasbourg, Basel, Nüremberg, and Augsburg. These developments helped reduce regional differences and standardize the literary language.

Standard written German emerged during the first quarter of the 16th century in the eastern midland area of Erfurt, Meissen, Dresden, and Leipzig, where the inhabitants, originally from regions farther west and south-west, spoke a dialect based on the Middle and Upper German dialects of High German. Largely by means of Luther's translation of the Bible into German and his German pamphlets, hymns, and catechisms, the High German standard spread from the eastern midland throughout the rest of Germany. Thus, the term High German came to mean, on the one hand, all German dialects except those belonging to the Low German branch of the language, and, on the other hand, the literary language of Germany. By 1600 this literary language was firmly established, although its present form did not become recognizable until about the middle of the 18th century.

The various sections of Germany and of other European nations where German was spoken adhered to different standards of spelling until the 20th century. In 1901 a conference, in which representatives of northern and southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland took part, devised a uniform system of orthography that later came into acceptance. This system is outlined in Rechtschreibung der Deutschen Sprache (Orthography of the German Language, published in many editions), by the German philologist Konrad Duden.

No generally accepted standard of German pronunciation exists. As the result of the work of a commission established in 1898, composed of university professors and representatives of the German theatre, certain norms of pronunciation were, however, accepted. These rules have been codified in Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (German Stage Pronunciation), first published in 1898 and again in 1957 as Deutsche Hochsprache (Standard German). The speech even of highly educated Germans is affected by the pronunciation peculiar to their native dialects. Various German-speaking groups, such as the Swabians, Saxons, Austrians, and Swiss, can be distinguished readily by their characteristic types of pronunciation.

German is spoken by many millions of people throughout the world. Approximately 75.3 million Standard German-speaking people live in Germany, and several million under foreign administration. In addition, Standard German is spoken by 7.5 million people in Austria, 150,000 in Belgium, 50,000 in the Czech Republic, 500,000 in Poland, about 10,900 in Luxembourg, not many use Standard German in Switzerland as a mother tongue, but over 4.2 million speak Alemannic, and about 1.5 million Alemannic speakers live in Alsace-Lorraine, France. It thus ranks about tenth (along with French) in the number of speakers among the various world languages, with around 95 million speakers of Standard German alone worldwide. Reliable statistics are not available concerning the number of German-speaking people who inhabit all the regions of Eastern Europe from which Germans were expelled at the end of World War II.

Outside Europe, the largest number of people using a German variety as their mother tongue live in the Americas. An important group of German-speaking people in the United States are the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, who left the Palatinate region of Germany during the late 17th and the 18th centuries and settled in the south-eastern part of Pennsylvania. Other countries with a fairly large number of German-speaking citizens are Canada (approximately 561,000, mainly Plautdietsch), Mexico (40,000), Bolivia (28,567), and Paraguay (166,000 Standard German; 38,000 Plautdietsch).

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.