German · Deutsch

German with DW Learn German, Tagesschau, Easy German, and a carefully checked list of free and paid resources. · 97 checked resources.

About German

Language family
Indo-European, Germanic, West Germanic
Where it's spoken
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg
Speakers
roughly 135 million native speakers
Writing
Latin

German descends from the West Germanic dialects spoken across central Europe and standardized gradually after Martin Luther's 16th-century Bible translation helped fix a common written form. It is the most widely spoken native language in the European Union. Its close cousin Dutch and its more distant cousin English share large amounts of core vocabulary and grammar with it.

Speaker counts are approximate orders of magnitude for learners, not census figures. Family labels follow Glottolog-style classification; vitality notes (when shown) follow UNESCO WAL / Ethnologue-style framing and should be re-checked for program planning.

Sources