German (Deutsch [dt] ( listen)) is a West Germanic language..

It derives most of its

vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.
family [10] A number of
words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer from French and English. Widely spoken
languages which are most similar to German include Luxembourgish, Dutch,
Dutch the Frisian
languages, English and the Scandinavian languages.
languages
German is written using the Latin alphabet.
alphabet. In addition to the 26 standard letters, German has
three vowels with umlauts (/, /, and /) and the letter (a special kind of "s(s)", called
"Eszett" or "scharfes Es"; it originated as a ligature of archaic forms of the letters s and z,
which were represented as and , respectively, that is, + = = ).
German is spoken natively by about 100 million people, making it the most widely spoken
native language in the European Union and one of the major languages of the world.
world [11]
German is a pluricentric language,
language, with multiple countries having their own standardised
variants (e.g. Austrian German,
German Swiss Standard German)) as well as many dialects. There is
also one variant referred to as Standard German.
German is the only official language of Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein;
Liechtenstein one of the
official languages of Switzerland,
Switzerland Luxembourg, and Belgium;; and a recognised minor
language in many other countries, such as Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, Namibia,
Namibia and Poland. At
the same time, German is the second most commonly used scientific language and the third
largest contributor to research and development, as well as an important language
language in business
and culture. Worldwide, Germany is ranked number 5 in terms of annual publication of new
books. One tenth of all books (including e-books)
e books) in the world are published in German.
German [12][13]
[14]
German is also the third most used content language for websites.
websites