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116-611: According to the same linguistic survey, the dialect is flourishing in the areas where it is spoken, despite the fact that most speakers actively use Standard German . In the south of the area where Northern Bavarian is spoken, Central Bavarian is said to have higher prestige, and Northern Bavarian characteristics are therefore not as visible as in the north, where speakers even tend to use a heavy Northern Bavarian accent when speaking German . Northern Bavarian has 8 vowels : And 11 diphthongs : Before /l/ , /i, e, ɛ/ are rounded to [ʏ, ø, œ] . In southern varieties of Northern Bavarian

232-460: A de facto official language of Namibia after the end of German colonial rule alongside English and Afrikaans , and had de jure co-official status from 1984 until its independence from South Africa in 1990. However, the Namibian government perceived Afrikaans and German as symbols of apartheid and colonialism, and decided English would be the sole official language upon independence, stating that it

348-422: A possessive , or if it is used as a predicate , of which the latter is only present in some varieties. Adjectives without any determiner rarely occur. Below can the inflectional paradigms be seen, with the adjective [ɔːld̥] serving as an example. This is also the form used in all situations, when the adjective is used as a predicate, and therefore no paradigm is needed. Compare Northern Bavarian [ɔːld̥] with

464-402: A second language , and 75–100   million as a foreign language . This would imply the existence of approximately 175–220   million German speakers worldwide. German sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon estimated a number of 289 million German foreign language speakers without clarifying the criteria by which he classified a speaker. As of 2012 , about 90   million people, or 16% of

580-587: A "commonly used" language and the Pan South African Language Board is obligated to promote and ensure respect for it. Cameroon was also a colony of the German Empire from the same period (1884 to 1916). However, German was replaced by French and English, the languages of the two successor colonial powers, after its loss in World War I . Nevertheless, since the 21st century, German has become

696-516: A given word class is subject to inflection in a particular language, there are generally one or more standard patterns of inflection (the paradigms described below) that words in that class may follow. Words which follow such a standard pattern are said to be regular ; those that inflect differently are called irregular . For instance, many languages that feature verb inflection have both regular verbs and irregular verbs . In English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with

812-556: A greater need for regularity in written conventions. While the major changes of the MHG period were socio-cultural, High German was still undergoing significant linguistic changes in syntax, phonetics, and morphology as well (e.g. diphthongization of certain vowel sounds: hus (OHG & MHG "house") → haus (regionally in later MHG)→ Haus (NHG), and weakening of unstressed short vowels to schwa [ə]: taga (OHG "days")→ tage (MHG)). A great wealth of texts survives from

928-453: A native tongue today, mostly descendants of German colonial settlers . The period of German colonialism in Namibia also led to the evolution of a Standard German-based pidgin language called " Namibian Black German ", which became a second language for parts of the indigenous population. Although it is nearly extinct today, some older Namibians still have some knowledge of it. German remained

1044-679: A popular foreign language among pupils and students, with 300,000 people learning or speaking German in Cameroon in 2010 and over 230,000 in 2020. Today Cameroon is one of the African countries outside Namibia with the highest number of people learning German. In the United States, German is the fifth most spoken language in terms of native and second language speakers after English, Spanish , French , and Chinese (with figures for Cantonese and Mandarin combined), with over 1 million total speakers. In

1160-475: A result, the surviving texts are written in highly disparate regional dialects and exhibit significant Latin influence, particularly in vocabulary. At this point monasteries, where most written works were produced, were dominated by Latin, and German saw only occasional use in official and ecclesiastical writing. While there is no complete agreement over the dates of the Middle High German (MHG) period, it

1276-660: A segment is referred to as partial reduplication . Reduplication can serve both derivational and inflectional functions. A few examples are given below: Palancar and Léonard provided an example with Tlatepuzco Chinantec (an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Southern Mexico ), where tones are able to distinguish mood, person, and number: Case can be distinguished with tone as well, as in Maasai language (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania ) (Hyman, 2016): Because

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1392-553: A sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many Native American languages ) are called polysynthetic languages . Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish , are known as agglutinative languages , while languages in which a single inflection can convey multiple grammatical roles (such as both nominative case and plural, as in Latin and German ) are called fusional . In English most nouns are inflected for number with

1508-577: A sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement . For example, in "the man jumps", "man" is a singular noun, so "jump" is constrained in the present tense to use the third person singular suffix "s". Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages . They can be highly inflected (such as Georgian or Kichwa ), moderately inflected (such as Russian or Latin ), weakly inflected (such as English ), but not uninflected (such as Chinese ). Languages that are so inflected that

1624-449: A separate entry; the same goes for jump and jumped . Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages , which is a synonym for inflected languages . Morphemes may be added in several different ways: Reduplication is a morphological process where a constituent is repeated. The direct repetition of a word or root is called total reduplication (or full reduplication ). The repetition of

1740-473: A set of inflectional endings), where a class of words follow the same pattern. Nominal inflectional paradigms are called declensions , and verbal inflectional paradigms are termed conjugations . For instance, there are five types of Latin declension . Words that belong to the first declension usually end in -a and are usually feminine. These words share a common inflectional framework. In Old English , nouns are divided into two major categories of declension,

1856-540: A suffix but a clitic , although some linguists argue that it has properties of both. Old Norse was inflected, but modern Swedish , Norwegian , and Danish have lost much of their inflection. Grammatical case has largely died out with the exception of pronouns , just like English. However, adjectives , nouns , determiners and articles still have different forms according to grammatical number and grammatical gender. Danish and Swedish only inflect for two different genders while Norwegian has to some degree retained

1972-418: A verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding - s to the root dog to form dogs and adding - ed to wait to form waited . In contrast, derivation is the process of adding derivational morphemes , which create a new word from existing words and change

2088-593: Is Benzin , which is neuter in Standard German, but masculine in Northern Bavarian. Another example is Butter , which is feminine in Standard German, but it can be all three genders in Northern Bavarian depending on your location and local variation of the dialect. As in Standard German there are four cases in Northern Bavarian: nominative , accusative , genitive and dative . The genitive case, however,

2204-536: Is Modern English, as compared to Old English. In general, languages where deflexion occurs replace inflectional complexity with more rigorous word order , which provides the lost inflectional details. Most Slavic languages and some Indo-Aryan languages are an exception to the general Indo-European deflexion trend, continuing to be highly inflected (in some cases acquiring additional inflectional complexity and grammatical genders , as in Czech & Marathi ). Old English

2320-580: Is a recognized minority language in the following countries: In France, the High German varieties of Alsatian and Moselle Franconian are identified as " regional languages ", but the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1998 has not yet been ratified by the government. Namibia also was a colony of the German Empire, from 1884 to 1915. About 30,000 people still speak German as

2436-469: Is also inflected according to case. Its declension is defective , in the sense that it lacks a reflexive form. The following table shows the conjugation of the verb to arrive in the indicative mood : suffixes inflect it for person, number, and tense: The non-finite forms arriv e (bare infinitive), arriv ed (past participle) and arriv ing (gerund/present participle), although not inflected for person or number, can also be regarded as part of

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2552-596: Is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects , with many varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of these non-standard varieties have become recognized and protected by regional or national governments. Since 2004, heads of state of the German-speaking countries have met every year, and the Council for German Orthography has been the main international body regulating German orthography . German

2668-563: Is also simplified in common usage. Afrikaans , recognized as a distinct language in its own right rather than a Dutch dialect only in the early 20th century, has lost almost all inflection. The Romance languages , such as Spanish , Italian , French , Portuguese and especially – with its many cases – Romanian , have more overt inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation . Adjectives, nouns and articles are considerably less inflected than verbs, but they still have different forms according to number and grammatical gender. Latin ,

2784-546: Is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages . The Germanic languages are traditionally subdivided into three branches: North Germanic , East Germanic , and West Germanic . The first of these branches survives in modern Danish , Swedish , Norwegian , Faroese , and Icelandic , all of which are descended from Old Norse . The East Germanic languages are now extinct, and Gothic

2900-465: Is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb. The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word). For example,

3016-441: Is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. Its categories can be determined only from its context. Languages that seldom make use of inflection, such as English , are said to be analytic . Analytic languages that do not make use of derivational morphemes , such as Standard Chinese , are said to be isolating . Requiring the forms or inflections of more than one word in

3132-545: Is called conjugation , while the inflection of nouns , adjectives , adverbs , etc. can be called declension . An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix , suffix , infix , circumfix , and transfix ), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut ), or other modifications. For example, the Latin verb ducam , meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix -am , expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The use of this suffix

3248-472: Is called the "German Sprachraum ". German is the official language of the following countries: German is a co-official language of the following countries: 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. Within Europe, German

3364-430: Is complicated by the existence of several varieties whose status as separate "languages" or "dialects" is disputed for political and linguistic reasons, including quantitatively strong varieties like certain forms of Alemannic and Low German . With the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties, it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language , 10–25   million speak it as

3480-520: Is generally seen as ending when the 1346–53 Black Death decimated Europe's population. Modern High German begins with the Early New High German (ENHG) period, which Wilhelm Scherer dates 1350–1650, terminating with the end of the Thirty Years' War . This period saw the further displacement of Latin by German as the primary language of courtly proceedings and, increasingly, of literature in

3596-595: Is generally seen as lasting from 1050 to 1350. This was a period of significant expansion of the geographical territory occupied by Germanic tribes, and consequently of the number of German speakers. Whereas during the Old High German period the Germanic tribes extended only as far east as the Elbe and Saale rivers, the MHG period saw a number of these tribes expanding beyond this eastern boundary into Slavic territory (known as

Northern Bavarian - Misplaced Pages Continue

3712-476: Is high, especially change in vowel length is common. This is a phonetic transcription of a text in Northern Bavarian, with translations in German and English. ɪç bɪn ɪn ʒdoːᵈl ɡɔŋə, ᶷn do βoən daːm drɪnə, ᶷn dao ɪz uəm və də mlʲ aː ɪz uəm troi̯t aːvɡʒit kβeːzd... Ich bin in den Stadel gegangen, und da waren Tauben drinnen, und da ist oben von der Mühle auch ist oben Getreide aufgeschüttet gewesen... I went into

3828-488: Is increasingly common. Northern Bavarian has about 33 consonants : /r/ is realized as either [ɐ] or [ə] when occurring postvocally. /lʲ/ may be syllabic, as in Northern Bavarian [ml̩ʲ] ; compare Standard German Mühle . All nouns in Northern Bavarian have one of three genders : feminine, masculine and neuter. Many nouns have the same gender as in Standard German , but there are many exceptions. An example

3944-559: Is less closely related to languages based on Low Franconian dialects (e.g., Dutch and Afrikaans), Low German or Low Saxon dialects (spoken in northern Germany and southern Denmark ), neither of which underwent the High German consonant shift. As has been noted, the former of these dialect types is Istvaeonic and the latter Ingvaeonic, whereas the High German dialects are all Irminonic; the differences between these languages and standard German are therefore considerable. Also related to German are

4060-435: Is one of the major languages of the world . German is the second-most widely spoken Germanic language , after English, both as a first and as a second language . German is also widely taught as a foreign language , especially in continental Europe (where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French), and in the United States. Overall, German is the fourth most commonly learned second language, and

4176-587: Is one of the three biggest newspapers in Namibia and the only German-language daily in Africa. An estimated 12,000 people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa, mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the largest communities consists of the speakers of "Nataler Deutsch", a variety of Low German concentrated in and around Wartburg . The South African constitution identifies German as

4292-401: Is partly derived from Latin and Greek , along with fewer words borrowed from French and Modern English . English, however, is the main source of more recent loanwords . German is a pluricentric language ; the three standardized variants are German , Austrian , and Swiss Standard German . Standard German is sometimes called High German , which refers to its regional origin. German

4408-454: Is productive, in particular in masculine nouns. The most common plural marker in feminine nouns is [n] , while it is [ɐ] with most neuter nouns. Many nouns, across the genders, are the same in the plural as in the singular . Weak masculine nouns are inflected in the accusative and dative case, most commonly with suffixation of a nasal consonant, such as [m] or [n] , while the other cases remain uninflected. Many weak feminine nouns have

4524-442: Is rare, and is only present in some few monosyllabic verbs, such as [za͡i] , Standard German sein , English to be ; [ɡ̊ɛi] , Standard German gehen , English to go ; [ʒ̊d̥ɛi] , Standard German stehen , English to stand ; and [d̥o͡u] , Standard German tun , English to do . The second ending is the most common ending found on most verbs, such as [b̥itn̩] , Standard German bitten , English to ask . The third ending

4640-510: Is the Sachsenspiegel , the first book of laws written in Middle Low German ( c.  1220 ). The abundance and especially the secular character of the literature of the MHG period demonstrate the beginnings of a standardized written form of German, as well as the desire of poets and authors to be understood by individuals on supra-dialectal terms. The Middle High German period

4756-627: Is the most widely spoken and official (or co-official) language in Germany , Austria , Switzerland , Liechtenstein , and the Italian autonomous province of South Tyrol . It is also an official language of Luxembourg , Belgium and the Italian autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia , as well as a recognized national language in Namibia . There are also notable German-speaking communities in France ( Alsace ),

Northern Bavarian - Misplaced Pages Continue

4872-566: Is the only language in this branch which survives in written texts. The West Germanic languages, however, have undergone extensive dialectal subdivision and are now represented in modern languages such as English, German, Dutch , Yiddish , Afrikaans , and others. Within the West Germanic language dialect continuum, the Benrath and Uerdingen lines (running through Düsseldorf - Benrath and Krefeld - Uerdingen , respectively) serve to distinguish

4988-429: Is the same as the first person singular, and the plural imperative is the same as the second person plural. Only one exception exists, which is the imperative of [z̥a͡i] , Standard German sein , English to be , which is [b̥iː] . Only one verb with a distinct simple past tense form remains, [z̥ai̯] , Standard German sein , English to be , with the simple past tense form [βoə̯] , Standard German war , English

5104-418: Is uncommon and is commonly replaced either with the dative and a possessive pronoun or with the preposition von [v̥ə, v̥ən, v̥əm] and the dative, e.g. [m̩̩ v̥ɑtɐ z̥ãi haːu̯z̥] , or [s̩ haːu̯z̥ v̥om v̥ɑtɐ] father's house . An exception is the genitive instead of the dative after the singular possessive pronouns, e.g. [hintɐ mai̯nɐ] , which is as correct as [hintɐ miɐ̯] behind me . Prepositions take

5220-481: Is understood in all areas where German is spoken. Approximate distribution of native German speakers (assuming a rounded total of 95 million) worldwide: As a result of the German diaspora , as well as the popularity of German taught as a foreign language , the geographical distribution of German speakers (or "Germanophones") spans all inhabited continents. However, an exact, global number of native German speakers

5336-421: Is used with verbs having a certain stem-final consonant, such as [z̥iŋɐ] , Standard German singen , English to sing . The personal endings for the present tense differ slightly from variety to variety, but are largely uniform. The endings in the scheme below are attached to the stem, and not the non-finite form. The stem is found by removing the non-finite ending, if it is [n] or [ɐ] . As can be seen in

5452-673: The Ostsiedlung ). With the increasing wealth and geographic spread of the Germanic groups came greater use of German in the courts of nobles as the standard language of official proceedings and literature. A clear example of this is the mittelhochdeutsche Dichtersprache employed in the Hohenstaufen court in Swabia as a standardized supra-dialectal written language. While these efforts were still regionally bound, German began to be used in place of Latin for certain official purposes, leading to

5568-627: The Alamanni , Bavarian, and Thuringian groups, all belonging to the Elbe Germanic group ( Irminones ), which had settled in what is now southern-central Germany and Austria between the second and sixth centuries, during the great migration. In general, the surviving texts of Old High German (OHG) show a wide range of dialectal diversity with very little written uniformity. The early written tradition of OHG survived mostly through monasteries and scriptoria as local translations of Latin originals; as

5684-557: The Czech Republic ( North Bohemia ), Poland ( Upper Silesia ), Slovakia ( Košice Region , Spiš , and Hauerland ), Denmark ( North Schleswig ), Romania and Hungary ( Sopron ). Overseas, sizeable communities of German-speakers are found in Brazil ( Blumenau and Pomerode ), South Africa ( Kroondal ), Namibia , among others, some communities have decidedly Austrian German or Swiss German characters (e.g. Pozuzo , Peru). German

5800-522: The Early Middle Ages . German is an inflected language , with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular, plural). It has strong and weak verbs . The majority of its vocabulary derives from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, while a smaller share

5916-473: The European Union 's population, spoke German as their mother tongue, making it the second most widely spoken language on the continent after Russian and the second biggest language in terms of overall speakers (after English), as well as the most spoken native language. 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

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6032-514: The German states . While these states were still part of the Holy Roman Empire , and far from any form of unification, the desire for a cohesive written language that would be understandable across the many German-speaking principalities and kingdoms was stronger than ever. As a spoken language German remained highly fractured throughout this period, with a vast number of often mutually incomprehensible regional dialects being spoken throughout

6148-724: The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I , and the other being Meißner Deutsch , used in the Electorate of Saxony in the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg . Alongside these courtly written standards, the invention of the printing press led to the development of a number of printers' languages ( Druckersprachen ) aimed at making printed material readable and understandable across as many diverse dialects of German as possible. The greater ease of production and increased availability of written texts brought about increased standardisation in

6264-644: The Old High German language in several Elder Futhark inscriptions from as early as the sixth century AD (such as the Pforzen buckle ), the Old High German period is generally seen as beginning with the Abrogans (written c.  765–775 ), a Latin-German glossary supplying over 3,000 Old High German words with their Latin equivalents. After the Abrogans , the first coherent works written in Old High German appear in

6380-771: The Proto-Indo-European language was highly inflected, all of its descendant Indo-European languages , such as Albanian , Armenian , English , German , Ukrainian , Russian , Persian , Kurdish , Italian , Irish , Spanish , French , Hindi , Marathi , Urdu , Bengali , and Nepali , are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin , Ancient Greek , Old English , Old Norse , Old Church Slavonic and Sanskrit are extensively inflected because of their temporal proximity to Proto-Indo-European. Deflexion has caused modern versions of some Indo-European languages that were previously highly inflected to be much less so; an example

6496-640: The Sprachraum in Europe. German is used in a wide variety of spheres throughout the country, especially in business, tourism, and public signage, as well as in education, churches (most notably the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK) ), other cultural spheres such as music, and media (such as German language radio programs by the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation ). The Allgemeine Zeitung

6612-479: The Standard German language in its written form, and the Duden Handbook was declared its standard definition. Punctuation and compound spelling (joined or isolated compounds) were not standardized in the process. The Deutsche Bühnensprache ( lit.   ' German stage language ' ) by Theodor Siebs had established conventions for German pronunciation in theatres , three years earlier; however, this

6728-503: The Upper German dialects spoken in the southern German-speaking countries , such as Swiss German ( Alemannic dialects ) and the various Germanic dialects spoken in the French region of Grand Est , such as Alsatian (mainly Alemannic, but also Central–and   Upper Franconian dialects) and Lorraine Franconian (Central Franconian). After these High German dialects, standard German

6844-462: The pagan Germanic tradition. Of particular interest to scholars, however, has been the Hildebrandslied , a secular epic poem telling the tale of an estranged father and son unknowingly meeting each other in battle. Linguistically, this text is highly interesting due to the mixed use of Old Saxon and Old High German dialects in its composition. The written works of this period stem mainly from

6960-466: The strong and weak ones, as shown below: The terms "strong declension" and "weak declension" are primarily relevant to well-known dependent-marking languages (such as the Indo-European languages , or Japanese ). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional (prepositional or postpositional) phrases can carry inflectional morphemes. In head-marking languages , the adpositions can carry

7076-714: The Empire. Its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Prague (German: Prag ) and Budapest ( Buda , German: Ofen ), to name two examples, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain; others, like Pressburg ( Pozsony , now Bratislava), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, and cities like Zagreb (German: Agram ) or Ljubljana (German: Laibach ), contained significant German minorities. In

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7192-459: The English mice , children and women (see English plural ) and the French yeux (the plural of œil , "eye"); and irregular comparative and superlative forms of adjectives or adverbs, such as the English better and best (which correspond to the positive form good or well ). Irregularities can have four basic causes: For more details on some of the considerations that apply to regularly and irregularly inflected forms, see

7308-422: The English language. Despite the march toward regularization, modern English retains traces of its ancestry, with a minority of its words still using inflection by ablaut (sound change, mostly in verbs) and umlaut (a particular type of sound change, mostly in nouns), as well as long-short vowel alternation. For example: For details, see English plural , English verbs , and English irregular verbs . When

7424-422: The English word cars is a noun that is inflected for number , specifically to express the plural; the content morpheme car is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while the suffix -s is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word. These two morphemes together form the inflected word cars . Words that are never subject to inflection are said to be invariant ; for example, the English verb must

7540-718: The Frisian languages— North Frisian (spoken in Nordfriesland ), Saterland Frisian (spoken in Saterland ), and West Frisian (spoken in Friesland )—as well as the Anglic languages of English and Scots. These Anglo-Frisian dialects did not take part in the High German consonant shift, and the Anglic languages also adopted much vocabulary from both Old Norse and the Norman language . The history of

7656-475: The German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the Migration Period , which separated Old High German dialects from Old Saxon . This sound shift involved a drastic change in the pronunciation of both voiced and voiceless stop consonants ( b , d , g , and p , t , k , respectively). The primary effects of the shift were the following below. While there is written evidence of

7772-447: The German states; the invention of the printing press c.  1440 and the publication of Luther's vernacular translation of the Bible in 1534, however, had an immense effect on standardizing German as a supra-dialectal written language. The ENHG period saw the rise of several important cross-regional forms of chancery German, one being gemeine tiutsch , used in the court of

7888-675: The Germanic dialects that were affected by the High German consonant shift (south of Benrath) from those that were not (north of Uerdingen). The various regional dialects spoken south of these lines are grouped as High German dialects, while those spoken to the north comprise the Low German and Low Franconian dialects. As members of the West Germanic language family, High German, Low German, and Low Franconian have been proposed to be further distinguished historically as Irminonic , Ingvaeonic , and Istvaeonic , respectively. This classification indicates their historical descent from dialects spoken by

8004-646: The Irminones (also known as the Elbe group), Ingvaeones (or North Sea Germanic group), and Istvaeones (or Weser–Rhine group). Standard German is based on a combination of Thuringian - Upper Saxon and Upper Franconian dialects, which are Central German and Upper German dialects belonging to the High German dialect group. German is therefore closely related to the other languages based on High German dialects, such as Luxembourgish (based on Central Franconian dialects ) and Yiddish . Also closely related to Standard German are

8120-507: The MHG period. Significantly, these texts include a number of impressive secular works, such as the Nibelungenlied , an epic poem telling the story of the dragon -slayer Siegfried ( c.  thirteenth century ), and the Iwein , an Arthurian verse poem by Hartmann von Aue ( c.  1203 ), lyric poems , and courtly romances such as Parzival and Tristan . Also noteworthy

8236-530: The Middle High German and Standard German [oː, aː] . Compare Standard German Schaf [ʃaːf] , Stroh [ʃtroː] and Northern Bavarian [ʒ̊ɔu̯v̥] , [ʒ̊d̥rɔu̯] . Likewise, the Northern Bavarian diphthong [ɛi̯] corresponds to the Middle High German and Standard German [eː] and by unrounding to [øː] . Compare Standard German Schnee [ʃneː] , böse [ˈbøːzə] with Northern Bavarian [ʒ̊n̥ɛi̯] , [b̥ɛi̯z̥] . In many Northern Bavarian variants, nasalization

8352-634: The Standard German alt , in English old . The predicate form of an adjective differ from the other forms, not only because it is the basic form, but also because it has a long vowel, unlike the other forms, as in [ɔːld̥] above. Other examples include [ɡ̊rɔːu̯z̥] and [b̥rɔːɐ̯d̥] , which become [ɡ̊rou̯s] and [b̥roi̯t] , respectively. Compare with the Standard German gross and breit , in English big and broad . Comparative adjectives are formed by suffixing [ɐ] , and superlative adjectives are formed by suffixing [st] . Vowel changes often take place when

8468-556: The above four cases to the locative marking them by differences in the use of prepositions. Lithuanian breaks them out of the genitive case , accusative case and locative case by using different postpositions. Dual form is obsolete in standard Latvian and nowadays it is also considered nearly obsolete in standard Lithuanian. For instance, in standard Lithuanian it is normal to say "dvi varnos (plural) – two crows" instead of "dvi varni (dual)". Adjectives, pronouns, and numerals are declined for number, gender, and case to agree with

8584-405: The article on regular and irregular verbs . Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes : An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme or root word is called its declension if it is a noun, or its conjugation if it is a verb. Below is the declension of the English pronoun I , which is inflected for case and number. The pronoun who

8700-461: The barn, and there were pigeons in it, and then, upstairs, there was grain heaped up as well, from the mill... German language German (German: Deutsch , pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family , mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe . It is the most spoken native language within the European Union . It

8816-417: The conjugation of the verb to arrive . Compound verb forms , such as I have arrived , I had arrived , or I will arrive , can be included also in the conjugation of the verb for didactic purposes, but they are not overt inflections of arrive . The formula for deriving the covert form, in which the relevant inflections do not occur in the main verb, is An inflectional paradigm refers to a pattern (usually

8932-434: The dative or the accusative, but not the genitive, e.g. [d̥rots n̩ reːŋ] (formally [d̥rots m̩ reːŋ] ) despite the rain . The dative ending -m often sounds like the accusative ending -n (see the previous example), so that these two cases are not distinguishable. Nouns in Northern Bavarian are inflected for number, and to a lesser extent, case. Inflecting for number is common across all three genders, and especially umlaut

9048-430: The development of non-local forms of language and exposed all speakers to forms of German from outside their own area. 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. His Bible was ubiquitous in the German states: nearly every household possessed a copy. Nevertheless, even with

9164-404: The dialect so as to make the work as natural and accessible to German speakers as possible. Copies of Luther's Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region, translating words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Luther said the following concerning his translation method: One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it; he must ask the mother in

9280-641: The diphthongs /iə̯, uə̯/ are realized with an opener offset, i.e. [iɐ̯, uɐ̯] . An interesting aspect of the diphthongs are the so-called reversed diphthongs , or in German, gestürzte Diphthonge . They are called so because the Middle High German diphthongs [ie̯, ye̯, uo̯] became [ei̯, ou̯] ( [y] became [i] after unrounding) in Northern Bavarian, while they generally became [iː, yː, uː] in Standard German . Compare Standard German Brief [briːf] , Bruder [ˈbruːdɐ] , Brüder [ˈbryːdɐ] and Northern Bavarian [ˈb̥rei̯v̥] , [ˈb̥rou̯d̥ɐ] , [ˈb̥rei̯d̥ɐ] . The Northern Bavarian diphthong [ɔu̯] corresponds to

9396-507: The eastern provinces of Banat , Bukovina , and Transylvania (German: Banat, Buchenland, Siebenbürgen ), German was the predominant language not only in the larger towns—like Temeschburg ( Timișoara ), Hermannstadt ( Sibiu ), and Kronstadt ( Brașov )—but also in many smaller localities in the surrounding areas. In 1901, the Second Orthographic Conference ended with a (nearly) complete standardization of

9512-509: The ending -[e]d . Therefore, verbs like play , arrive and enter are regular, while verbs like sing , keep and go are irregular. Irregular verbs often preserve patterns that were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous; in rare cases, there are regular verbs that were irregular in past forms of the language. (For more details see English verbs and English irregular verbs .) Other types of irregular inflected form include irregular plural nouns, such as

9628-417: The ending [n] in most cases, though not to be confused with the plural ending. Weak neuter nouns have almost been lost, with only strong remaining, and therefore inflection for case is basically nonexistent. The inflection of adjectives in Northern Bavarian differ depending on whether the adjective is preceded by a definite article or a demonstrative , or if it is preceded by an indefinite article or

9744-619: The exception of the teens, which are handled as plural; thus, 102 is dual, but 12 or 127 are not). In addition, in some Slavic languages, such as Polish, word stems are frequently modified by the addition or absence of endings, resulting in consonant and vowel alternation . Modern Standard Arabic (also called Literary Arabic) is an inflected language. It uses a system of independent and suffix pronouns classified by person and number and verbal inflections marking person and number. Suffix pronouns are used as markers of possession and as objects of verbs and prepositions. The tatweel (ـــ) marks where

9860-616: The feminine forms and inflects for three grammatical genders like Icelandic. However, in comparison to Icelandic, there are considerably fewer feminine forms left in the language. In comparison, Icelandic preserves almost all of the inflections of Old Norse and remains heavily inflected. It retains all the grammatical cases from Old Norse and is inflected for number and three different grammatical genders. The dual number forms are however almost completely lost in comparison to Old Norse. Unlike other Germanic languages, nouns are inflected for definiteness in all Scandinavian languages, like in

9976-415: The first group where the vowel in the non-finite form is the same as in the past participle; and the second group where the vowel in the non-finite form is different from the vowel in the past participle. The most common vowel gradations in the second group can be seen below: Apophony is not as common with weak verbs as in Standard German. However, the number of weak verbs with morphophonological variations

10092-523: The following case for Norwegian (nynorsk) : Adjectives and participles are also inflected for definiteness in all Scandinavian languages like in Proto-Germanic . Modern German remains moderately inflected, retaining four noun cases, although the genitive started falling into disuse in all but formal writing in Early New High German . The case system of Dutch , simpler than that of German,

10208-421: The future and conditional). Inflection is also present in adjective comparation and word derivation. Declensional endings depend on case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, vocative), number (singular, dual or plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and animacy (animate vs inanimate). Unusual in other language families, declension in most Slavic languages also depends on whether

10324-435: 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. When Christ says ' ex abundantia cordis os loquitur ,' I would translate, if I followed the papists, aus dem Überflusz des Herzens redet der Mund . But tell me is this talking German? What German understands such stuff? No,

10440-422: The inflection in adpositional phrases. This means that these languages will have inflected adpositions. In Western Apache ( San Carlos dialect), the postposition -ká’ 'on' is inflected for person and number with prefixes: Traditional grammars have specific terms for inflections of nouns and verbs but not for those of adpositions . Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify

10556-510: The inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" → "dog- s "), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call- ed "). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with -s ), and the present participle (with -ing ). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with -er and -est respectively). There are eight regular inflectional affixes in

10672-474: The influence of Luther's Bible as an unofficial written standard, a widely accepted standard for written German did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century. German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire , which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe . Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of

10788-517: The largest concentrations of German speakers are in the states of Rio Grande do Sul (where Riograndenser Hunsrückisch developed), Santa Catarina , and Espírito Santo . Inflection In linguistic morphology , inflection (less commonly, inflexion ) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense , case , voice , aspect , person , number , gender , mood , animacy , and definiteness . The inflection of verbs

10904-455: The masculine ( أنتم antum and هم hum ), whereas in Lebanese and Syrian Arabic, هم hum is replaced by هنّ hunna . In addition, the system known as ʾIʿrāb places vowel suffixes on each verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, according to its function within a sentence and its relation to surrounding words. The Uralic languages are agglutinative , following from

11020-402: The mother in the home and the plain man would say, Wesz das Herz voll ist, des gehet der Mund über . Luther's translation of the Bible into High German was also decisive for the German language and its evolution from Early New High German to modern Standard German. The publication of Luther's Bible was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy in early modern Germany , and promoted

11136-972: The mother tongue of the Romance languages, was highly inflected; nouns and adjectives had different forms according to seven grammatical cases (including five major ones) with five major patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues. There were four patterns of conjugation in six tenses, three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, plus the infinitive, participle, gerund, gerundive, and supine) and two voices (passive and active), all overtly expressed by affixes (passive voice forms were periphrastic in three tenses). The Baltic languages are highly inflected. Nouns and adjectives are declined in up to seven overt cases. Additional cases are defined in various covert ways. For example, an inessive case , an illative case , an adessive case and allative case are borrowed from Finnic. Latvian has only one overt locative case but it syncretizes

11252-630: The ninth century, chief among them being the Muspilli , Merseburg charms , and Hildebrandslied , and other religious texts (the Georgslied , Ludwigslied , Evangelienbuch , and translated hymns and prayers). The Muspilli is a Christian poem written in a Bavarian dialect offering an account of the soul after the Last Judgment , and the Merseburg charms are transcriptions of spells and charms from

11368-553: The noun they modify or for which they substitute. Baltic verbs are inflected for tense, mood, aspect, and voice. They agree with the subject in person and number (not in all forms in modern Latvian). All Slavic languages make use of a high degree of inflection, typically having six or seven cases and three genders for nouns and adjectives. However, the overt case system has disappeared almost completely in modern Bulgarian and Macedonian . Most verb tenses and moods are also formed by inflection (however, some are periphrastic , typically

11484-811: The other used when unstressed. There is no gender distinction in the plural. The ending [j] in the stressed first person singular nominative and -accusative and in stressed the second person singular accusative is only present in northern- and western varieties of Northern Bavarian. At the time of a linguistic survey carried out in the late 1980s, pronouns also existed for unstressed first person plural accusative and unstressed second person plural accusative, [iz] and [iç] , respectively, but they have probably fallen out of usage today. Verbs in Northern Bavarian are conjugated for person , tense and mood . The Northern Bavarian verbs are also subject to both vowel change and apophony . The non-finite forms have one three endings: [∅] , [n] and [ɐ] . The first ending

11600-465: The past indicative and subjunctive ( looked ), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative ( looks ), an inflected form for the present participle ( looking ), and an uninflected form for everything else ( look ). While the English possessive indicator 's (as in "Jennifer's book") is a remnant of the Old English genitive case suffix, it is now considered by syntacticians not to be

11716-462: The pronunciation of the ending -ig as [ɪk] instead of [ɪç]. In Northern Germany, High 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 High German was a written language, not identical to any spoken dialect, throughout the German-speaking area until well into the 19th century. However, wider standardization of pronunciation

11832-431: The scheme above, the first person singular is basically the same as the stem, and the first- and third persons plural are the same as the non-finite form. Furthermore, the third person singular is realized as - [d̥] when occurring before a fortis obstruent, and that in some southern varieties of Northern Bavarian the first person plural has the ending - [mɐ] , and therefore isn't the non-finite form. The singular imperative

11948-603: The scheme below in the present, as they are irregular . They have the past participles, [ɡ̊hɔt] and [ɡ̊βeːn] , respectively. Compare with Standard German gehaben and gewesen , English had and been . Examples can be seen below: It is quite straightforward to form the subjunctive in Northern Bavarian. The subjunctive of verbs is formed with the suffix - [ɐd̥] , as in [βisn̩] > [βisɐd̥] , Standard German wissen > wüßte , English to know > I would know . Both weak verbs and strong verbs may undergo apophony . The strong verbs can be split into two groups:

12064-616: The semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word, such as by changing a noun to a verb. Distinctions between verbal moods are mainly indicated by derivational morphemes. Words are rarely listed in dictionaries on the basis of their inflectional morphemes (in which case they would be lexical items). However, they often are listed on the basis of their derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list readable and readability , words with derivational suffixes, along with their root read . However, no traditional English dictionary lists book as one entry and books as

12180-541: The states of North Dakota and South Dakota , German is the most common language spoken at home after English. As a legacy of significant German immigration to the country , German geographical names can be found throughout the Midwest region , such as New Ulm and Bismarck (North Dakota's state capital), plus many other regions. A number of German varieties have developed in the country and are still spoken today, such as Pennsylvania Dutch and Texas German . In Brazil,

12296-401: The suffixation happens. An example is [hɔːu̯ɣ̊] , which becomes [ˈhɛi̯xɐ] when comparative and [ˈhɛi̯kst] when superlative. Compare with the Standard German hoch , höher and höchsten , in English high , higher and highest . The pronouns of Northern Bavarian differ slightly from variety to variety. Furthermore, there are two pairs of pronouns, one used when in stressed position and

12412-496: The third most commonly learned second language in the United States in K-12 education. The language has been influential in the fields of philosophy, theology, science, and technology. It is the second most commonly used language in science and the third most widely used language on websites . The German-speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of annual publication of new books, with one-tenth of all books (including e-books) in

12528-503: The verb stem, verb form, noun, or preposition is placed. Arabic regional dialects (e.g. Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic), used for everyday communication, tend to have less inflection than the more formal Literary Arabic. For example, in Jordanian Arabic, the second- and third-person feminine plurals ( أنتنّ antunna and هنّ hunna ) and their respective unique conjugations are lost and replaced by

12644-458: The word is a noun or an adjective. Slovene and Sorbian languages use a rare third number, (in addition to singular and plural numbers) known as dual (in case of some words dual survived also in Polish and other Slavic languages). Modern Russian, Serbian and Czech also use a more complex form of dual , but this misnomer applies instead to numbers 2, 3, 4, and larger numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4 (with

12760-543: The world being published in German. German is most closely related to other West Germanic languages, namely Afrikaans , Dutch , English , the Frisian languages , and Scots . It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic group , such as Danish , Norwegian , and Swedish . Modern German gradually developed from Old High German , which in turn developed from Proto-Germanic during

12876-579: The written form of German. One of the central events in the development of ENHG was the publication of Luther's translation of the Bible into High German (the New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament was published in parts and completed in 1534). Luther based his translation primarily on the Meißner Deutsch of Saxony , spending much time among the population of Saxony researching

12992-737: Was . The past tense of other verbs is formed in the same way as Standard German uses haben or sein , English to have and to be , respectively, and the past participle . The past participle in Northern Bavarian is formed by the prefix [ɡ̊] -, although not on verbs beginning with a plosive consonant , where the prefix is left out. Thus we see [ɡ̊ʒ̊it] , Standard German geschüttet , English shaken ; [ɡ̊numɐ] , Standard German genommen , English taken ; [b̥rɑxd̥] , Standard German gebracht , English brought ; and [d̥roŋ] , Standard German getragen , English carried . The verbs [hɔm] and [z̥ai̯] , Standard German haben and sein , English to have and to be , can be seen conjugated in

13108-429: Was a "neutral" language as there were virtually no English native speakers in Namibia at that time. German, Afrikaans, and several indigenous languages thus became "national languages" by law, identifying them as elements of the cultural heritage of the nation and ensuring that the state acknowledged and supported their presence in the country. Today, Namibia is considered to be the only German-speaking country outside of

13224-417: Was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic , Faroese or German . Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the Old English inflectional system. Modern English is considered a weakly inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and its regular verbs have only four forms: an inflected form for

13340-530: Was an artificial standard that did not correspond to any traditional spoken dialect. Rather, it was based on the pronunciation of German in Northern Germany, although it was subsequently regarded often as a general prescriptive norm, despite differing pronunciation traditions especially in the Upper-German-speaking regions that still characterise the dialect of the area today – especially

13456-427: Was established on the basis of public speaking in theatres and the media during the 20th century and documented in pronouncing dictionaries. Official revisions of some of the rules from 1901 were not issued until the controversial German orthography reform of 1996 was made the official standard by governments of all German-speaking countries. Media and written works are now almost all produced in Standard German which

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