- Until about 1800, standard German was almost only a written language. At this time, people in urban northern Germany, who spoke dialects very different from Standard German, learnt it almost like a foreign language and tried to pronounce it as close to the spelling as possible.
- Prescriptive pronunciation guides used to consider northern German pronunciation to be the standard. However, the actual pronunciation of standard German varies from region to region.
West Germanic Languages group - The first dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, the 16 parts of which were issued between 1852 and 1860, remains the most comprehensive guide to the words of the German language.
- In 1860 grammatical and orthographic rules first appeared in the Ducien Handbook.
- In 1901, this was declared the standard definition of the German language.
- Official revisions of some of these rules were not issued until 1998, when the German spelling reform of 1996 was officially promulgated by governmental representatives of all German-speaking countries.
- In these modern days Germany is surrounded by language borders, in the north by the Frisian and Danish; in the east Polish, Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian; in the south Slovenian, Italian, Friulian, Latin and Romanish; in the west French and Dutch.
- Except for Frisian and Dutch, none of these languages are West Germanic, and so they are clearly distinct from German
Neighboring Languages - While German is grammatically quite similar to Dutch in many ways, it is very different in speech
- Dutch speakers are generally able to read German and German speakers who can speak Low German or English are generally able to read Dutch, but have problems understanding the spoken language.
- Germans who speak High German or even better. Low German can cope with Dutch much better than people from Southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria who have grown up with the Alemannic or Bavarian dialects.
Neighboring Languages - Standard German is the only official language in Germany, Liechtenstein, and Austria; it shares official status in Switzerland (with French, Italian and Romansh), and Luxembourg (with French and Luxembourgish).
- It is used as a local official language in German-speaking regions of Belgium, Italy, Denmark, and Poland. It is one of the 20 official languages of the European Union.
Neighboring Languages - It is also a minority language in Poland, Canada, France, Russia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Togo, Cameroon, the USA, Namibia, Brazil, Paraguay, Hungary, Slovakia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Croatia, Ukraine, Argentina and Australia.
- German is also the second language of the Internet. More than 8% of websites are written in German, English 50%, French 6%, Japanese 5%, Spanish 3% and Portuguese 2%.
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