German Translation

German is the official language of Germany and Austria and one of the three official languages of Switzerland. German belongs to the West Germanic group of the Indo-European language family, together with English, Frisian and Dutch (Flemish).

The history of the Germanic languages starts with their speakers’ first contact with the Romans in the 1^st century BC. At the time and for several centuries, there was only one "Germanic tongue", with little more than small differences in dialect. Only after the 6^th century AD could one speak of a distinctive German language.

German is an inflected language, with four cases for nouns, pronouns and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative), three genders (masculine, feminine and neutral) and strong and weak verbs. In total, German is the mother tongue of over 90 million speakers and is probably the seventh most spoken language in the world in terms of native speakers (after Chinese, English, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish and Russian). German is one of the most widely learned foreign languages and is one of the Western world's major languages of culture.