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History portal. v. t. e. The appearance of the German language begins in the Early Middle Ages with the High German consonant shift. Old High German, Middle High German, and Early New High German span the duration of the Holy Roman Empire. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of Standard German and a decrease of dialectal variety.
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, English, French, Italian, and German. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, [4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe .)
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
The Franco-German friendship became the basis for the political integration of Western Europe in the European Union. In 1998–1999, Germany was one of the founding countries of the eurozone. Germany remains one of the economic powerhouses of Europe, contributing about 1/4 of the eurozone's annual gross domestic product.
German ( Standard High German: Deutsch, pronounced [dɔʏ̯t͡ʃ] ⓘ) [ 10] is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol.
Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east. Europe shares the landmass of Eurasia with Asia, and of Afro-Eurasia with both Asia and Africa.
The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. The German term Deutschland, originally diutisciu land ('the German lands'), is derived from deutsch (cf. Dutch), descended from Old High German diutisc 'of the people' (from diot or diota 'people'), originally used to distinguish the language of the ...
Roman bronze statuette representing a Germanic man with his hair in a Suebian knot. Dating to the late 1st century – early 2nd century A.D. The Germanic peoples were tribal groups who lived in the north of Europe in Classical Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In modern scholarship, they typically include not only the Roman-era Germani who ...