German is spoken by approximately 100 million people all over the world. It is an official language in: Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Austria, Switzerland as well as provinces found in eastern France and northern Italy. German speakers have also emigrated to numerous other countries. Here are some more interesting facts about the German language:
There are around 200 modern dialects of German. These dialects, called Mundart in German, are regional and can be so different as to cause people to be unable to communicate with each other. Therefore, German speakers learn High German or Hochdeutsch in school. All newspapers are written in this standard German and this is also how business and politics is conducted.
The German alphabet features some interesting letters. The letters a, u and o can all add an umlaut (two dots above it) and create a new vowel sound. There is also the letter which looks somewhat like a B in English but is actually a double s. It has two names: eszett or scharfes s and looks like this: ß.
Until 1945 German was written with an old Gothic style script known as Faktura. This script was commonly used throughout Western Europe until the 17th century but continued in Germany until the end of WWII.
Finally, the German language allows for enormously long compound nouns. While these are definitely tongue twisters for newcomers to the language, they are also a lot of fun to learn. Here is one of my favourites: die Verschlimmbesserung. Defined as an intended improvement that makes things worse!
