German

Where did the standard language come from

Standard German grew out of written forms, and Luther's translation of the Bible, whose New Testament appeared in 1522, drew on Meißner Deutsch, the chancery language of the Saxon court, and gave that form a readership across the German lands. For most of the 19th century High German was mainly a written language, and in the north it was foreign to speakers whose everyday dialects were Low German.

The spelling was fixed in 1901, when the Second Orthographic Conference made the Duden handbook its standard definition. Punctuation and compound spelling were left out, and the next official revision came with the orthography reform of 1996, adopted by the governments of every German-speaking country, and the Council for German Orthography has been the main international body for spelling since 2004.

Why German has three national standards

German is pluricentric. Germany, Austria and Switzerland each have a standard variety of their own, which differ in vocabulary, in some pronunciation and in points of grammar and spelling. These standards are separate from the dialects, which run from Low German in the north, untouched by the High German consonant shift, to the Alemannic dialects of Switzerland and Alsace in the south. Luxembourgish and Yiddish grew from the same High German dialect group as the standard.

What marks German on the page

Every noun takes a capital letter, a convention German now shares only with Luxembourgish and a few North Frisian dialects. The umlauts ä, ö and ü are written ae, oe and ue where a keyboard lacks them, and ß becomes ss. The ß had no capital form for most of its history, so capitals turned it into SS, until a capital ẞ entered German orthography in 2017. Long compounds are common, although chains of more than three or four nouns turn up mostly in jokes.

Where German has standing beyond these countries

The list above follows national law. Below that level German is co-official in the Italian province of South Tyrol, where it is the majority language. In Namibia, a German colony from 1884 to 1915, it was co-official from 1984 until independence in 1990 and is now one of the country's national languages, with about 30,000 native speakers and a German-language daily, the Allgemeine Zeitung.