Origin
German is a West Germanic language that belongs to the Indo-European language group – as well as English. Despite common roots, English and German nowadays look very different at first glance. There are several reasons for that deceiving first impression:
- English has borrowed to a great extent from Greek and Latin
- English has been heavily influenced by French during the Norman Conquest, while German tends to favour words with Germanic roots
- German has retained more complex grammar with inflection, while English has been through stages of grammar simplification
Thus, it is possible to find almost identical phrasings in the languages:
- She has brown hair.
- Sie hat braunes Haar.
Or, on the other hand, one can find examples of sentences where their relatedness is elusive:
- Recycling is crucial in saving the environment.
- Wiederverwertung ist wesentlich, um die Umwelt zu schützen.
English and German are also replete with Germanic cognates of the same meaning:
- bed / Bett
- Earth / Erde
- finger / Finger
- hand / Hand
- louse / Lause
- son / Sohn
and with false friends:
- brief / Brief (letter)
- fast / fast (almost)
- gift / Gift (poison)
- guilty / gültig (valid)
- realise / realizieren (to implement)
Structure
German has the same grammatical structure as English. It uses nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, prepositions, pronouns and so forth. It features mainly the same grammatical categories (number, gender, person, case …), although many are obsolete or no longer discernible through endings in modern English. Still, the logic behind the language remains basically the same. German uses the same Germanic roots for words as English, making it easy for an English speaker to identify many words and guess their meaning.
German is more systematic than English. It consists of many rules and very few exceptions. Even when they do come into play, they are clearly marked and can be easily memorised. If you do not have an ear for (foreign) languages, that will not hamper your German, because it is built upon rules and paradigms.
Distribution
It is spoken natively by approximately 100 million people living in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Belgium, and Italian autonomous province South Tyrol. German has been granted status of an official and working language in the European union, co-official language in Namibia and provinces of Poland, and the working language of Swiss Guard in Vatican. Additionally, it has been recognised as a protected minority language in regions of Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
Approximately 80 million people speak German as a non-native language, making its knowledge a valuable asset in Central and Eastern Europe, where it is still being taught in school as a compulsory foreign language. Outside Europe, there are sizeable minorities of German-speaking population in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia.
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