One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it; he must ask the mother in the home, the children on the streets, the common man in the market-place and note carefully how they talk, then translate accordingly. They will then understand what is said to them because it is German.
But tell me is this talking German? What German understands such stuff? With Luther's rendering of the Bible in the vernacular German asserted itself against the dominance of Latin as a legitimate language for courtly, literary, and now ecclesiastical subject-matter. Further, his Bible was ubiquitous in the German states with nearly every household possessing a copy.
German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire , which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the midth century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire. Its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Some cities, such as Prague German: Prag and Budapest Buda , German: Ofen , were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain. Others, such as Pozsony German: Pressburg , now Bratislava , were originally settled during the Habsburg period, and were primarily German at that time.
Prague, Budapest and Bratislava as well as cities like Zagreb German: Agram , and Ljubljana German: Laibach , contained significant German minorities. In the eastern provinces of Banat and Transylvania German: This dictionary was created by the Brothers Grimm and is composed of 16 parts which were issued between and In , the 2nd Orthographical Conference ended with a complete standardization of the German language in its written form and the Duden Handbook was declared its standard definition.
In Northern Germany, Standard German was a foreign language to most inhabitants, whose native dialects were subsets of Low German. It was usually encountered only in writing or formal speech; in fact, most of Standard German was a written language, not identical to any spoken dialect, throughout the German-speaking area until well into the 19th century. Official revisions of some of the rules from were not issued until the controversial German orthography reform of was made the official standard by governments of all German-speaking countries.
Approximate distribution of native German speakers assuming a rounded total of 95 million worldwide. Due to the German diaspora as well as German being the second most widely spoken language in Europe and the third most widely taught foreign language in the US [11] and the EU in upper secondary education [38] amongst others, the geographical distribution of German speakers or "Germanophones" spans all inhabited continents.
As for the number of speakers of any language worldwide, an assessment is always compromised by the lack of sufficient, reliable data. In Europe, German is the second most widely spoken mother tongue after Russian and the second biggest language in terms of overall speakers after English. The area in central Europe where the majority of the population speaks German as a first language and has German as a co- official language is called the " German Sprachraum ". It comprises an estimated 88 million native speakers and 10 million who speak German as a second language e.
Although expulsions and forced assimilation after the two World Wars greatly diminished them, minority communities of mostly bilingual German native speakers exist in areas both adjacent to and detached from the Sprachraum. In France , the High German varieties of Alsatian and Moselle Franconian are identified as " regional languages ", but the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages of has not yet been ratified by the government. Namibia was a colony of the German Empire from to Mostly descending from German settlers who immigrated during this time, 25—30, people still speak German as a native tongue today.
Although it is nearly extinct today, some older Namibians still have some knowledge of it. German, along with English and Afrikaans was a co-official language of Namibia from until its independence from South Africa in At this point, the Namibian government perceived Afrikaans and German as symbols of apartheid and colonialism, and decided English would be the sole official language, claiming that it was a "neutral" language as there were virtually no English native speakers in Namibia at that time.
Hoffmann , radio the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation produces radio programs in German , and music e. The Allgemeine Zeitung is one of the three biggest newspapers in Namibia and the only German-language daily in Africa. Mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries, an estimated 12, people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa. The South African constitution identifies German as a "commonly used" language and the Pan South African Language Board is obligated to promote and ensure respect for it.
In the United States, the states of North Dakota and South Dakota are the only states where German is the most common language spoken at home after English. In Australia , the state of South Australia experienced a pronounced wave of immigration in the s from Prussia particularly the Silesia region. With the prolonged isolation from other German speakers and contact with Australian English , a unique dialect known as Barossa German has developed and is spoken predominantly in the Barossa Valley near Adelaide.
Usage of German sharply declined with the advent of World War I , due to the prevailing anti-German sentiment in the population and related government action.
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It continued to be used as a first language into the twentieth century but now its use is limited to a few older speakers. German migration to New Zealand in the 19th century was less pronounced than migration from Britain, Ireland, and perhaps even Scandinavia. Despite this there were significant pockets of German-speaking communities which lasted until the first decades of the 20th century.
German-speakers settled principally in Puhoi , Nelson , and Gore. At the last census , 36, people in New Zealand spoke German, making it the third most spoken European language after English and French and overall the ninth most spoken language. There is also an important German creole being studied and recovered, named Unserdeutsch , spoken in the former German colony of German New Guinea , across Micronesia and in northern Australia i. The risk of its extinction is serious and efforts to revive interest in the language are being implemented by scholars.
Like French and Spanish , German has become a classic second foreign language in the western world, as English Spanish in the US is well established as the first foreign language. Standard German originated not as a traditional dialect of a specific region but as a written language. However, there are places where the traditional regional dialects have been replaced by new vernaculars based on standard German; that is the case in large stretches of Northern Germany but also in major cities in other parts of the country. It is important to note, however, that the colloquial standard German differs greatly from the formal written language, especially in grammar and syntax, in which it has been influenced by dialectal speech.
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Standard German differs regionally between German-speaking countries in vocabulary and some instances of pronunciation and even grammar and orthography. This variation must not be confused with the variation of local dialects. Even though the regional varieties of standard German are only somewhat influenced by the local dialects, they are very distinct. German is thus considered a pluricentric language.
In most regions, the speakers use a continuum from more dialectal varieties to more standard varieties according to circumstances. In German linguistics , German dialects are distinguished from varieties of standard German. The varieties of standard German refer to the different local varieties of the pluricentric standard German.
They differ only slightly in lexicon and phonology. In certain regions, they have replaced the traditional German dialects, especially in Northern Germany. Swiss Standard German is used in the Swiss education system, whereas Austrian Standard German is officially used in the Austrian education system. A mixture of dialect and standard does not normally occur in Northern Germany either. Because their linguistic distance to it is greater, they do not mesh with Standard German the way that High German dialects such as Bavarian, Swabian, Hessian can.
German is a member of the West Germanic language of the Germanic family of languages , which in turn is part of the Indo-European language family. The German dialects are the traditional local varieties; many of them are hardly understandable to someone who knows only standard German, and they have great differences in lexicon , phonology and syntax. If a narrow definition of language based on mutual intelligibility is used, many German dialects are considered to be separate languages for instance in the Ethnologue.
However, such a point of view is unusual in German linguistics. The variation among the German dialects is considerable, with often only neighbouring dialects being mutually intelligible. Some dialects are not intelligible to people who know only Standard German. Middle Low German was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League. It was the predominant language in Northern Germany until the 16th century. In , the Luther Bible was published. The translation is considered to be an important step towards the evolution of the Early New High German.
It aimed to be understandable to a broad audience and was based mainly on Central and Upper German varieties. The Early New High German language gained more prestige than Low German and became the language of science and literature. Around the same time, the Hanseatic League, based around northern ports, lost its importance as new trade routes to Asia and the Americas were established, and the most powerful German states of that period were located in Middle and Southern Germany.
The 18th and 19th centuries were marked by mass education in Standard German in schools. Gradually, Low German came to be politically viewed as a mere dialect spoken by the uneducated. Today, Low Saxon can be divided in two groups: Low Saxon varieties with a reasonable Standard German influx [ clarification needed ] and varieties of Standard German with a Low Saxon influence known as Missingsch. Sometimes, Low Saxon and Low Franconian varieties are grouped together because both are unaffected by the High German consonant shift.
However, the proportion of the population who can understand and speak it has decreased continuously since World War II. The largest cities in the Low German area are Hamburg and Dortmund. The Low Franconian dialects are the dialects that are more closely related to Dutch than to Low German.
Most of the Low Franconian dialects are spoken in the Netherlands and in Belgium , where they are considered as dialects of Dutch, which is itself a Low Franconian language. These dialects are more closely related to Dutch also North Low Franconian than the South Low Franconian dialects also referred to as East Limburgish and, east of the Rhine , Bergish , which are spoken in the south of the German Low Franconian language area.
The High German varieties spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews have several unique features, and are considered as a separate language, Yiddish , written with the Hebrew alphabet. Modern Standard German is mostly based on Central German dialects. These dialects are considered as. Luxembourgish as well as the Transylvanian Saxon dialect spoken in Transylvania are based on Moselle Franconian dialects. They consist of the East- and South Franconian dialects.
The East Franconian dialect branch is one of the most spoken dialect branches in Germany. These dialects are spoken in the region of Franconia and in the central parts of Saxon Vogtland. The largest cities in the South Franconian area are Karlsruhe and Heilbronn. The Upper German dialects are the Alemannic dialects in the west, and the Bavarian dialects in the east.
The Alemannic dialects are considered as Alsatian in Alsace. The largest cities in the Bavarian area are Vienna and Munich. German is a fusional language with a moderate degree of inflection , with three grammatical genders ; as such, there can be a large number of words derived from the same root. German nouns inflect by case, gender and number:. This degree of inflection is considerably less than in Old High German and other old Indo-European languages such as Latin , Ancient Greek and Sanskrit , and it is also somewhat less than, for instance, Old English , modern Icelandic or Russian.
The three genders have collapsed in the plural. In nouns, inflection for case is required in the singular for strong masculine and neuter nouns only in the genitive only in archaic use in the dative , and even this is losing ground to substitutes in informal speech. Weak masculine nouns share a common case ending for genitive, dative and accusative in the singular. Feminine nouns are not declined in the singular. The plural has an inflection for the dative. In total, seven inflectional endings not counting plural markers exist in German: In German orthography, nouns and most words with the syntactical function of nouns are capitalised to make it easier for readers to determine the function of a word within a sentence Am Freitag ging ich einkaufen.
Like the other Germanic languages, German forms noun compounds in which the first noun modifies the category given by the second,: Unlike English, whose newer compounds or combinations of longer nouns are often written in "open" with separating spaces, German like some other Germanic languages nearly always uses the "closed" form without spaces, for example: Like English, German allows arbitrarily long compounds in theory see also English compounds.
However, examples like this are perceived by native speakers as excessively bureaucratic, stylistically awkward or even satirical. The meaning of basic verbs can be expanded and sometimes radically changed through the use of a number of prefixes. Other prefixes have only the vaguest meaning in themselves; ver- is found in a number of verbs with a large variety of meanings, as in ver suchen to try from suchen to seek , ver nehmen to interrogate from nehmen to take , ver teilen to distribute from teilen to share , ver stehen to understand from stehen to stand.
Other examples include the following: Many German verbs have a separable prefix, often with an adverbial function. In finite verb forms, it is split off and moved to the end of the clause and is hence considered by some to be a "resultative particle". For example, mitgehen , meaning "to go along", would be split, giving Gehen Sie mit? German word order is generally with the V2 word order restriction and also with the SOV word order restriction for main clauses. For polar questions, exclamations and wishes, the finite verb always has the first position.
In subordinate clauses, the verb occurs at the very end. German requires for a verbal element main verb or auxiliary verb to appear second in the sentence. The verb is preceded by the topic of the sentence. The element in focus appears at the end of the sentence. For a sentence without an auxiliary, these are some possibilities:. The position of a noun in a German sentence has no bearing on its being a subject, an object or another argument. In a declarative sentence in English, if the subject does not occur before the predicate, the sentence could well be misunderstood.
The flexible word order also allows one to use language "tools" such as poetic meter and figures of speech more freely. When an auxiliary verb is present, it appears in second position, and the main verb appears at the end. This occurs notably in the creation of the perfect tense. Many word orders are still possible:. The main verb may appear in first position to put stress on the action itself. The auxiliary verb is still in second position. Sentences using modal verbs place the infinitive at the end.
For example, the English sentence "Should he go home? Thus, in sentences with several subordinate or relative clauses, the infinitives are clustered at the end. Compare the similar clustering of prepositions in the following highly contrived English sentence: German subordinate clauses have all verbs clustered at the end. Given that auxiliaries encode future , passive , modality , and the perfect , very long chains of verbs at the end of the sentence can occur.
In these constructions, the past participle in ge- is often replaced by the infinitive. Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the European language family. Latin words were already imported into the predecessor of the German language during the Roman Empire and underwent all the characteristic phonetic changes in German. Their origin is thus no longer recognizable for most speakers e.
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Borrowing from Latin continued after the fall of the Roman Empire during Christianization, mediated by the church and monasteries. Another important influx of Latin words can be observed during Renaissance humanism. In a scholarly context, the borrowings from Latin have continued until today, in the last few decades often indirectly through borrowings from English. During the 15th to 17th centuries, the influence of Italian was great, leading to many Italian loanwords in the fields of architecture, finance, and music.
The influence of the French language in the 17th to 19th centuries resulted in an even greater import of French words. The English influence was already present in the 19th century, but it did not become dominant until the second half of the 20th century. At the same time, the effectiveness of the German language in forming equivalents for foreign words from its inherited Germanic stem repertory is great. The tradition of loan translation was revitalized in the 18th century, with linguists like Joachim Heinrich Campe , who introduced close to words that are still used in modern German.
Even today, there are movements that try to promote the Ersatz substitution of foreign words deemed unnecessary with German alternatives. As in English, there are many pairs of synonyms due to the enrichment of the Germanic vocabulary with loanwords from Latin and Latinized Greek. These words often have different connotations from their Germanic counterparts and are usually perceived as more scholarly.
The size of the vocabulary of German is difficult to estimate. The modern German scientific vocabulary is estimated at nine million words and word groups based on the analysis of 35 million sentences of a corpus in Leipzig, which as of July included million words in total. The Duden is the de facto official dictionary of the German language, first published by Konrad Duden in The Duden is updated regularly, with new editions appearing every four or five years.
As of August [update] , it is in its 27th edition and in 12 volumes, each covering different aspects such as loanwords , etymology , pronunciation , synonyms , and so forth. The first of these volumes, Die deutsche Rechtschreibung German Orthography , has long been the prescriptive source for the spelling of German. The Duden has become the bible of the German language, being the definitive set of rules regarding grammar, spelling and usage of German. It is the Austrian counterpart to the German Duden and contains a number of terms unique to Austrian German or more frequently used or differently pronounced there.
The most recent edition is the 42nd from The dictionary is also officially used in the Italian province of South Tyrol. This is a selection of cognates in both English and German. Instead of the usual infinitive ending -en German verbs are indicated by a hyphen "-" after their stems. Words that are written with capital letters in German are nouns.
German is written in the Latin alphabet. Because legibility and convenience set certain boundaries, compounds consisting of more than three or four nouns are almost exclusively found in humorous contexts. In contrast, although English can also string nouns together, it usually separates the nouns with spaces.
For example, "toilet bowl cleaner". Some operating systems use key sequences to extend the set of possible characters to include, amongst other things, umlauts; in Microsoft Windows this is done using Alt codes. German readers understand these transcriptions although they appear unusual , but they are avoided if the regular umlauts are available because they are a makeshift, not proper spelling. In Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein, city and family names exist where the extra e has a vowel lengthening effect, e.
There is no general agreement on where letters with umlauts occur in the sorting sequence. Telephone directories treat them by replacing them with the base vowel followed by an e. Some dictionaries sort each umlauted vowel as a separate letter after the base vowel, but more commonly words with umlauts are ordered immediately after the same word without umlauts. These variants of the Latin alphabet are very different from the serif or sans-serif Antiqua typefaces used today, and the handwritten forms in particular are difficult for the untrained to read.
The printed forms, however, were claimed by some to be more readable when used for Germanic languages. The Nazis initially promoted Fraktur and Schwabacher because they were considered Aryan , but they abolished them in , claiming that these letters were Jewish. The Fraktur script however remains present in everyday life in pub signs, beer brands and other forms of advertisement, where it is used to convey a certain rusticality and antiquity. Many Antiqua typefaces include the long s also.
A specific set of rules applies for the use of long s in German text, but nowadays it is rarely used in Antiqua typesetting. The long s only appears in lower case. The orthography reform of led to public controversy and considerable dispute. After 10 years, without any intervention by the federal parliament, a major revision was installed in , just in time for the coming school year. In , some traditional spellings were finally invalidated, whereas in , on the other hand, many of the old comma rules were again put in force. Traditionally, this letter was used in three situations:.
In German, vowels excluding diphthongs; see below are either short or long , as follows:. My mother loved the showy cooking where they prepared the fish for the guests. I also had a crash course in sailing at a local sailing school.
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The other pupils came from different countries, but everybody tried to speak in English. At the end, I even got my sailing license. That was hard work in such a short time, so I am quite proud. My little brother loved the animation for children in the hotel. In the evening, we always went to the dance club for kids where he could dance and play together with other children. The only thing I didn't like was that there was no free wifi at the hotel.
Have you ever been on a rather adventurous trip, like a safari in Africa or a trip through India? Then tell your story about this outstanding experience similar to my example below:.
- Free German Essay on My Holidays: Meine Ferien.
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Dies war eine gute Gelegenheit, die anderen Teilnehmer schon ein bisschen kennen zu lernen. Wir schliefen in Zelten, und das Plumpsklo war tief im dunklen Wald verborgen. Alle Tiere, die ich dort gesehen habe, waren auf dem Wasser. Wir haben vom Kajak aus viele Fotos geschossen. Jeden Tag sind wir woanders hingepaddelt und haben uns einen neuen Schlafplatz gesucht. Deshalb mussten wir immer all unsere Sachen im Kajak verstauen. Das war zuerst recht kompliziert und hat lange gedauert.
So eine Reise hatte ich vorher noch nie gemacht und alles war sehr aufregend. Eine Reise, die man nicht vergisst. I went on a whale watching trip to Canada during summer vacation. Eight other participants and two group leaders took part, and the trip took place on the sea between Vancouver Island and the continent. The night before the tour started, the group met in a restaurant on Quadra Island to talk about the structure of the tour.
It was also a great opportunity to get to know the other participants a bit, and the group leaders showed us the route on a map. After staying overnight in a lovely holiday house on Quadra Island, which can only be reached by ferry and is situated off the shores of Vancouver Island, we were picked up in the morning and had to drive for some hours to the north of Vancouver Island to a little port called Telegraph Cove. There we put the kayaks and all the stuff we needed onto a motorboat and drove to an unpopulated little island nearby.
There we spent our first night without electricity, running water, or cell phone reception. We slept in tents, and the pit latrine was hidden in the dark forest. Some girls didn't dare to go there on their own because they were afraid that they could have been bitten by wild animals. The animals that I saw were all on the water. You could see humpback whales, orcas, seals, purple starfish, and lots of different birds. We took many photos from our kayaks. Everyday, we paddled somewhere else and looked for another place to sleep.
Therefore, we always had to take all our stuff with us in the kayaks.
That was quite complicated first and took a long time. I had never been on a journey like that before, and everything was exciting to me. A journey you will never forget. In each of my German articles, I introduce you to a German saying, and what you would say in English. I only chose sayings that I actually use myself to make sure that they are still up to date. If you are talking about a person and you are surprised that she or he is out of date, you would say: Or, if you want to emphasize that you are not out of date yourself you would say: Ich bin doch nicht.
Sign in or sign up and post using a HubPages Network account. Comments are not for promoting your articles or other sites. Could you do a video on how to structure a sentence in the past, present and future. This then means I can write my own essay, they are great help but I would like to do it myself. Dear ratnaveera, I am really happy that you like it. That is my first hub in which I use pictures from Freedigitalphotos. It is really a great source.
I am planning to add a YouTube video with me reading the German text so that you will be able to learn the proper pronunciation as well. So it is worth to have a look at my hubs again. This is what I am longing for!
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After learning four cases in German grammar, I feel that your essays in each topic would be very helpful in my German writing. We everyone might have our own holiday and travel experiences. Your essays here will definitely help me so much to improve my writing. Thanks a lot for this Great Job on HubPages! Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. HubPages and Hubbers authors may earn revenue on this page based on affiliate relationships and advertisements with partners including Amazon, Google, and others.
To provide a better website experience, owlcation. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so. For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: Free German Essay on My Holidays: Meine Ferien Updated on December 12, The examples that I show you below are structured like this: First, you'll find an example of a short essay in German.
It shows you how you can describe your holidays, what you have done, or where you have been. Since there are lots of possibilities, I wrote some more examples for you to chose from. Following the German part, you will find the English translation of the German text. After the examples of short essays, you will find a list of German key words and conjugated verbs that I have provided for you so that you do not have to look them up in a dictionary.
My aim is to provide a time effective aid for your German homework. Now, let's get started! Two Weeks at a Youth Camp Have you spent two weeks with other young people at a holiday camp? Then you could write a text similar to this one: Here is the story in English Note: Example One Read Aloud. My Trip to the Seaside If you spend your summer vacation at the seaside, have a look at this example, and you can use the pattern for your own vacation's description. Listen to "My Trip to the Seaside". Whale Watching in Canada Have you ever been on a rather adventurous trip, like a safari in Africa or a trip through India?
Then tell your story about this outstanding experience similar to my example below: And here is my English version: