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160-587: For prehistory , Forster et al . (2004) and Forster and Renfrew (2011) observe that there is a correlation of language shift with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not necessarily with intrusive female mtDNA . They conclude that technological innovation (the transition from hunting-gathering to farming , or from stone to metal tools) or military prowess (as in the abduction of British women by Vikings to Iceland ) causes immigration of at least some men, who are perceived to be of higher status than local men. Then, in mixed-language marriages, children would speak

320-460: 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

480-585: A diglossic spectrum with little conflict. For instance, the local Venetian dialects in Northeast Italy are widely used and locally promoted in the region; after all, Italian had been an integral part of the Republic of Venice since the 14th century, whose elites used to revere the most prominent Tuscan authors and tuscanize their own speech as well. On a survey made by Il Gazzettino in 2015, 70% of respondents told they spoke Venetian "very or quite often" in

640-402: 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

800-587: 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

960-705: A French-only approach (mid-19th century), marginalizing Basque, and by the 1960s family transmission was grinding to a halt in many areas at the feet of the Pyrenees. By the 2010s, the receding trend has been somewhat mitigated by the establishment of Basque schooling (the ikastolak ) spearheaded by the network Seaska , as well as the influence of the Basque territories from Spain . According to Fañch Broudic , Breton has lost 80% of its speakers in 60 years. Other sources mention that 70% of Breton speakers are over 60. Furthermore, 60% of children received Breton from their parents in

1120-576: A common impurity. Tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before 3000 BCE. The Bronze Age forms part of the three-age system for prehistoric societies. In this system, it follows the Neolithic in some areas of the world. While copper is a common ore, deposits of tin are rare in the Old World , and often had to be traded or carried considerable distances from

1280-487: A daily basis and at home during the 19th century (especially after the 1831 November Uprising and the 1863 January Uprising ) gradually returned back to the Lithuanian language. Before the 1930s, Italian was the only official language of Malta, although it was spoken only by the upper class, with Maltese being spoken by the lower class. Even though English has replaced Italian as a co-official language alongside Maltese,

1440-501: A first language/dialect. Most Hong Kong residents prefer to communicate in Cantonese in daily life. Speakers of Mandarin Chinese and of Cantonese cannot mutually understand each other without learning the languages, due to vast differences in pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure and terminology. Furthermore, cultural differences between Hong Kong and China result in variations between

1600-556: 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

1760-663: A much more evident Mesolithic era, lasting millennia. In Northern Europe , societies were able to live well on rich food supplies from the marshlands fostered by the warmer climate. Such conditions produced distinctive human behaviours that are preserved in the material record, such as the Maglemosian and Azilian cultures. These conditions also delayed the coming of the Neolithic until as late as 4000 BCE (6,000  BP ) in northern Europe. Remains from this period are few and far between, often limited to middens . In forested areas,

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1920-453: 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

2080-439: A nearly universal cultural and identity marker of mestizos (people of mixed Spanish and Amerindian ancestry), and also of culturally assimilated , upwardly mobile Amerindian people. Paraguayan Guarani has been used throughout Paraguayan history as a symbol of nationalistic pride. Populist dictators such as José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia and Alfredo Stroessner used the language to appeal to common Paraguayans, and upon

2240-519: A non-state or pre-state context if the elite employs a specific combination of encouragements and punishments. Ethnohistorical cases ... demonstrate that small elite groups have successfully imposed their languages in non-state situations. Anthony gives the example of the Luo-speaking Acholi in northern Uganda in the 17th and 18th century, whose language spread rapidly in the 19th century. Anthony notes that "Indo-European languages probably spread in

2400-679: 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

2560-475: 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

2720-462: A rise of monolingual French-speakers after 1910. Halfway through the 20th century, the number of monolingual French-speakers began to predominate over the (mostly) bilingual Flemish inhabitants. Only since the 1960s, after the establishment of the Belgian language border and the socio-economic development of Flanders took full effect, could Dutch use stem the tide of increasing French use. French remains

2880-504: A similar way among the tribal societies of prehistoric Europe", carried forward by "Indo-European chiefs" and their "ideology of political clientage". Anthony notes that "elite recruitment" may be a suitable term for this system. In urban settings, language change occurs due to the combination of three factors: the diversity of languages spoken, the high population density, and the need for communication. Urban vernaculars, urban contact varieties, and multiethnolects emerge in many cities around

3040-649: A single room. Settlements might have a surrounding stone wall to keep domesticated animals in and hostile tribes out. Later settlements have rectangular mud-brick houses where the family lived in single or multiple rooms. Burial findings suggest an ancestor cult with preserved skulls of the dead. The Vinča culture may have created the earliest system of writing. The megalithic temple complexes of Ġgantija are notable for their gigantic structures. Although some late Eurasian Neolithic societies formed complex stratified chiefdoms or even states, states evolved in Eurasia only with

3200-723: A single source. The emergence of metallurgy may have occurred first in the Fertile Crescent , where it gave rise to the Bronze Age in the 4th millennium BCE (the traditional view), although finds from the Vinča culture in Europe have now been securely dated to slightly earlier than those of the Fertile Crescent. Timna Valley contains evidence of copper mining 7,000 years ago. The process of transition from Neolithic to Chalcolithic in

3360-538: A wholesale language shift, with islanders changing their language practices to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65 percent of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a small minority, perhaps 10 percent, used Corsican as a first language. In Southern Schleswig , an area that belonged to Denmark until the Second Schleswig War , there

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3520-688: 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 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

3680-580: 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

3840-511: Is a shift towards Urdu in almost all domains. Pashtuns and other minorities in northern Pakistan use Urdu as a replacement for former native languages. Guarani, an indigenous language of South America belonging to the Tupi–Guarani family of the Tupian languages , and specifically the primary variety known as Paraguayan Guarani ( endonym avañe'ẽ [aʋãɲẽˈʔẽ] ; 'the people's language'),

4000-767: Is also a transition period between Stone Age and Bronze Age, the Chalcolithic or Copper Age. For the prehistory of the Americas see Pre-Columbian era . The notion of "prehistory" emerged during the Enlightenment in the work of antiquarians who used the word "primitive" to describe societies that existed before written records. The word "prehistory" first appeared in English in 1836 in the Foreign Quarterly Review . The geologic time scale for pre-human time periods, and

4160-547: 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

4320-546: 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

4480-511: Is an example. In archaeology, the Iron Age refers to the advent of ferrous metallurgy . The adoption of iron coincided with other changes, often including more sophisticated agricultural practices, religious beliefs and artistic styles, which makes the archaeological Iron Age coincide with the " Axial Age " in the history of philosophy. Although iron ore is common, the metalworking techniques necessary to use iron are different from those needed for

4640-488: Is anonymous. Because of this, reference terms that prehistorians use, such as " Neanderthal " or " Iron Age ", are modern labels with definitions sometimes subject to debate. The concept of a "Stone Age" is found useful in the archaeology of most of the world, although in the archaeology of the Americas it is called by different names and begins with a Lithic stage , or sometimes Paleo-Indian . The sub-divisions described below are used for Eurasia, and not consistently across

4800-747: Is called the Lower Paleolithic (as in excavations it appears underneath the Upper Paleolithic), beginning with the earliest stone tools dated to around 3.3 million years ago at the Lomekwi site in Kenya. These tools predate the genus Homo and were probably used by Kenyanthropus . Evidence of control of fire by early hominins during the Lower Palaeolithic Era is uncertain and has at best limited scholarly support. The most widely accepted claim

4960-472: 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

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5120-430: 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

5280-520: 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

5440-595: 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

5600-559: 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

5760-459: Is mainly occurring among Javanese people and in districts where Javanese is the dominant language, which is not what was expected. Another study suggests Javanese youths do not value Javanese language and culture as much as the national Indonesian language and culture because they perceive them as outdated and incompatible with modern society. An example is the shift from Canaanite and Phoenician and Hebrew to Aramaic in and around Jerusalem during

5920-515: Is not generally used in those parts of the world where the working of hard metals arrived abruptly from contact with Eurasian cultures, such as Oceania , Australasia , much of Sub-Saharan Africa , and parts of the Americas . With some exceptions in pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, these areas did not develop complex writing systems before the arrival of Eurasians, so their prehistory reaches into relatively recent periods; for example, 1788

6080-435: 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

6240-470: Is one of the official languages of Paraguay (along with Spanish ), where it is spoken by the majority of the population, and where half of the rural population is monolingual. Guarani is one of the most-widely spoken indigenous languages of the Americas and the only one whose speakers include a large proportion of non-indigenous people. This represents a unique anomaly in the Americas, where language shift towards European colonial languages has otherwise been

6400-587: 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

6560-401: 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

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6720-558: Is provided by a wide variety of natural and social sciences, such as anthropology , archaeology , archaeoastronomy , comparative linguistics , biology , geology , molecular genetics , paleontology , palynology , physical anthropology , and many others. Human prehistory differs from history not only in terms of its chronology , but in the way it deals with the activities of archaeological cultures rather than named nations or individuals . Restricted to material processes, remains, and artefacts rather than written records, prehistory

6880-542: Is seen as a transition period between the Stone Age and Bronze Age. An archaeological site in Serbia contains the oldest securely dated evidence of copper making at high temperature, from 7,500 years ago. The find in 2010 extends the known record of copper smelting by about 800 years, and suggests that copper smelting may have been invented independently in separate parts of Asia and Europe at that time, rather than spreading from

7040-491: Is that H. erectus or H. ergaster made fires between 790,000 and 690,000 BP in a site at Bnot Ya'akov Bridge , Israel . The use of fire enabled early humans to cook food, provide warmth, have a light source, deter animals at night and meditate. Early Homo sapiens originated some 300,000 years ago, ushering in the Middle Palaeolithic . Anatomic changes indicating modern language capacity also arise during

7200-510: 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

7360-566: 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

7520-481: 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

7680-569: Is used in art and in everyday life. Instances of language shift appear to have occurred twice in the history of the Parthian Empire : once before its foundation, when the Parni invaded Parthia , eventually losing their Eastern Middle Iranian language and adopting Parthian instead; secondly, after the fall of the Parthian Empire, Parthian speakers shifted to Middle Persian or Armenian . In

7840-446: Is usually taken as the end of the prehistory of Australia . The period when a culture is written about by others, but has not developed its own writing system, is often known as the protohistory of the culture. By definition, there are no written records from human prehistory, which can only be known from material archaeological and anthropological evidence: prehistoric materials and human remains. These were at first understood by

8000-506: Is when the first signs of human presence have been found; however, Africa and Asia contain sites dated as early as c.  2.5 and 1.8 million years ago, respectively. Depending on the date when relevant records become a useful academic resource, its end date also varies. For example, in Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3100 BCE, whereas in New Guinea

8160-673: 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

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8320-468: The African Great Lakes region and the other group settling in southern Ethiopia. There, the early Daasanach Nilotes would have come into contact with a Cushitic-speaking population, and eventually adopted this group's Afro-Asiatic language. Finland still has coastal Swedish-speaking enclaves , unlike Estonia where the last coastal Swedes were decimated or escaped to Sweden in 1944. As Finland

8480-627: 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

8640-520: The Bhumij language is one of the endangered languages of India. Indonesia is one of the most multilingual and multiethnic nations in the world. There is language shift of first language into Indonesian from other language in Indonesia caused by ethnic diversity than urbanicity. Regardless of urbanicity, Indonesian speakers are more prevalent in urban areas than rural ones. The study found that language shift

8800-637: The Copper Age or Bronze Age ; or, in some geographical regions, in the Iron Age ). The term Neolithic is commonly used in the Old World ; its application to cultures in the Americas and Oceania is complicated by the fact standard progression from stone to metal tools, as seen in the Old World, does not neatly apply. Early Neolithic farming was limited to a narrow range of plants, both wild and domesticated, which included einkorn wheat , millet and spelt , and

8960-522: 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

9120-417: 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

9280-514: 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

9440-724: 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

9600-644: 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

9760-472: The Paleolithic , by the Neolithic only Homo sapiens sapiens remained. This was a period of technological and social developments which established most of the basic elements of historical cultures, such as the domestication of crops and animals , and the establishment of permanent settlements and early chiefdoms. The era commenced with the beginning of farming , which produced the " Neolithic Revolution ". It ended when metal tools became widespread (in

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9920-461: The Philippines , Spanish -speaking families have gradually switched over to Tagalog or English since the end of World War II , so Spanish has ceased to be a practical everyday language in the country and is on the verge of extinction . Prehistory Prehistory , also called pre-literary history , is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c.  3.3   million years ago and

10080-473: The Sardinian population since then, the majority of the locals switched over to such politically dominant language and no longer speak their native ones, which have seen steady decline in use. The language has been in fact severely compromised to the point that only 13% of the children are able to speak it, and today is mostly kept as a heritage language . With the exception of a few sparsely populated areas where Sardinian can still be heard for everyday purposes,

10240-455: The Siwa Oasis , a local variety of Berber is also used alongside Arabic. In Ethiopia , various populations of Nilotic origin have shifted languages over the centuries, adopting the idioms of their Afro-Asiatic-speaking neighbors in the northern areas. Among these groups are the Daasanach or Marille, who today speak the Daasanach language . It belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. However, modern genetic analysis of

10400-427: 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

10560-422: 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

10720-400: 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

10880-502: The catechism in Flemish in many parishes. Nonetheless, since French enjoyed a much higher status than Dutch, from about the interbellum onward, everybody became bilingual, the generation born after World War II being raised exclusively in French. In the countryside, the passing on of Flemish stopped during the 1930s or 1940s. Consequently, the vast majority of those still having an active command of Flemish are older than 60. Therefore, complete extinction of French Flemish can be expected in

11040-408: 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

11200-606: The three-age system for human prehistory, were systematised during the nineteenth century in the work of British, French, German, and Scandinavian anthropologists , archaeologists , and antiquarians . The main source of information for prehistory is archaeology (a branch of anthropology), but some scholars are beginning to make more use of evidence from the natural and social sciences. The primary researchers into human prehistory are archaeologists and physical anthropologists who use excavation, geologic and geographic surveys, and other scientific analysis to reveal and interpret

11360-417: The "Chalcolithic", "Eneolithic", or "Copper Age" refers to a transitional period where early copper metallurgy appeared alongside the widespread use of stone tools. During this period, some weapons and tools were made of copper. This period was still largely Neolithic in character. It is a phase of the Bronze Age before it was discovered that adding tin to copper formed the harder bronze . The Copper Age

11520-400: The "higher-status" language, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today. Assimilation is the process whereby a speech-community becomes bilingual and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of the speech-community that speaks the second language more often at home. The data are used to measure the use of a given language in

11680-464: The 1920s and only 6% in the 1980s. Since the 1980s, monolingual speakers are no longer attested. On the 27 October 2015, the Senate rejected the draft law on ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages driving away the assumption of Congress for the adoption of the constitutional reform which would have given value and legitimacy to regional languages such as Breton. Corsican

11840-450: The 1940s and 50s, these dialects rapidly vanished. Most of Hong Kong's younger generation does not understand, let alone speak, their ancestral dialects. Beginning in the late 1990s, since Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty, Mandarin Chinese has been more widely implemented in education and many other areas of official society. Though Mandarin Chinese has been quickly adopted into society, most Hong Kong residents would not regard it as

12000-523: The 19th century, especially in the second half of it, Dutch was banned from all levels of education and lost most of its functions as a cultural language. The larger cities had become predominantly French-speaking by the end of the 19th century. However, in the countryside, many elementary schools continued to teach in Dutch until World War I , and the Roman Catholic Church continued to preach and teach

12160-678: The Azilian cultures, before spreading to Europe through the Iberomaurusian culture of Northern Africa and the Kebaran culture of the Levant . However, independent discovery is not ruled out. "Neolithic" means "New Stone Age", from about 10,200 BCE in some parts of the Middle East, but later in other parts of the world, and ended between 4,500 and 2,000 BCE. Although there were several species of humans during

12320-501: The Beijing dialect of Mandarin by the 19th century and the only Manchu speakers were garrisons left in their homeland of Heilongjiang . Today there are fewer than 100 native speakers of Manchu. At the current time, language shift is occurring all across China. Many languages of minority ethnic groups are declining, as well as the many regional varieties of Chinese . Generally the shift is in favour of Standard Chinese ( Mandarin ), but in

12480-492: The Belarusian language. In the last two centuries, Brussels has transformed from an exclusively Dutch-speaking city to a bilingual city with French as the majority language and lingua franca . The language shift began in the 18th century and accelerated as Belgium became independent and Brussels expanded out past its original city boundaries. From 1880 on, more and more Dutch-speaking people became bilingual, resulting in

12640-735: The Cantonese used in Hong Kong and that in Canton Province. In Egypt , the Coptic language , a descendant of the Afro-Asiatic Egyptian language , has been in decline in usage since the time of the Arab conquest in the 7th century. By the 17th century, it was eventually supplanted as a spoken language by Egyptian Arabic . Coptic is today mainly used by the Coptic Church as a liturgical language. In

12800-696: The Daasanach indicates that they are more closely related to Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo -speaking populations inhabiting Tanzania than they are to the Cushitic and Semitic Afro-Asiatic-speaking populations of Ethiopia. This suggests that the Daasanach were originally Nilo-Saharan speakers, sharing common origins with the Pokot . In the 19th century, the Nilotic ancestors of these two populations are believed to have begun separate migrations, with one group heading southwards into

12960-462: The Dutch origin of several town names in the region, such as that of 'Dunkerque' ( Dunkirk ) which is a French phonetic rendition of the original Dutch name 'Duinkerke' (meaning 'church in the dunes'). The linguistic situation did not change dramatically until the French Revolution in 1789, and Dutch continued to fulfill the main functions of a cultural language throughout the 18th century. During

13120-714: 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

13280-718: 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

13440-524: 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

13600-447: 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

13760-675: 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

13920-646: 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

14080-454: The Iron Age, often through conquest by empires, which continued to expand during this period. For example, in most of Europe conquest by the Roman Empire means the term Iron Age is replaced by "Roman", " Gallo-Roman ", and similar terms after the conquest. Even before conquest, many areas began to have a protohistory, as they were written about by literate cultures; the protohistory of Ireland

14240-845: 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 ), 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

14400-546: The Italian-speaking population has since grown, but the growth of English in the country now threatens the status of Maltese. A trend among the younger generations is to mix English and Italian vocabulary patterns, in making new Maltese words. For example, the Maltese word bibljoteka has been overtaken by librerija , formed from library with an Italian ending. In addition to mixing English with Italian, Maltenglish involves

14560-507: 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

14720-524: The Middle Ages, the territory of Lithuanian language was reaching vicinities of Łomża , Tykocin and Białystok , but shrank to the north – to the rural outskirts of Sejny , Punsk and Wiżajny before the 1900s as a consequence of acculturation . The Polish-speaking island to the north of Kaunas and south of Panevėžys almost fully disappeared between the 1920s and the 1940s, as the local Lithuanian population, who increasingly began to speak Polish on

14880-677: The Middle East is characterized in archaeological stone tool assemblages by a decline in high quality raw material procurement and use. North Africa and the Nile Valley imported its iron technology from the Near East and followed the Near Eastern course of Bronze Age and Iron Age development. The Bronze Age is the earliest period in which some civilizations reached the end of prehistory, by introducing written records. The Bronze Age, or parts thereof, are thus considered to be part of prehistory only for

15040-708: The Middle Palaeolithic. During the Middle Palaeolithic Era, there is the first definitive evidence of human use of fire. Sites in Zambia have charred logs, charcoal and carbonized plants, that have been dated to 180,000 BP. The systematic burial of the dead , music , prehistoric art , and the use of increasingly sophisticated multi-part tools are highlights of the Middle Paleolithic. The Upper Paleolithic extends from 50,000 and 12,000 years ago, with

15200-604: The Nazis during World War II) playing only a minor role. Despite the withdrawal of Belarus from the USSR proclaimed in 1991, use of the Belarusian language is declining. According to the 2009 Belarusian population census, 72% of Belarusians speak Russian at home, and Belarusian is used by only 11.9% of Belarusians. 52.5% of Belarusians can speak and read Belarusian. Only 29.4% can speak, read and write it. One in ten Belarusians do not understand

15360-400: The advent of Paraguayan democracy in 1992, Guarani was enshrined in the new constitution as a co-equal language along with Spanish. Jopara , the mixture of Spanish and Guarani, is spoken by an estimated 90% of the population of Paraguay. Code-switching between the two languages takes place on a spectrum where more Spanish is used for official and business-related matters, whereas more Guarani

15520-448: The beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems . The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c.  5,200 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing having spread to almost all cultures by the 19th century. The end of prehistory therefore came at different times in different places, and

15680-553: The case of Indigenous Australian "highways" known as songlines . The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age (from the Greek mesos , 'middle', and lithos , 'stone'), was a period in the development of human technology between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic . The Mesolithic period began with the retreat of glaciers at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, some 10,000 BP, and ended with

15840-858: The city's predominant language, while Dutch is spoken by a minority. Historically, one of the most important language shifts in China has been the near disappearance of the Manchu language . When China was ruled by the Qing dynasty , whose Emperors were Manchu, Chinese and Manchu had co-official status, and the Emperor heavily subsidized and promoted education in Manchu, but because most of the Manchu Eight Banners lived in garrisons with Mandarin-speaking Han Bannermen located across Han Chinese civilian populated cities, most Manchus spoke

16000-463: The collection of folklore and by analogy with pre-literate societies observed in modern times. The key step to understanding prehistoric evidence is dating, and reliable dating techniques have developed steadily since the nineteenth century. The most common of these dating techniques is radiocarbon dating . Further evidence has come from the reconstruction of ancient spoken languages . More recent techniques include forensic chemical analysis to reveal

16160-660: The coming decades. The French Basque Country has been subject to intense French-language pressure exerted over the Basque-speaking communities. In the late 1800s, the Basque language was both persecuted and excluded from administration and official public use during the takeover of the National Convention , during the War of the Pyrenees , and during the Napoleonic period . The compulsory national education system imposed early on

16320-480: The cultural, economic and military choices made by the local population in question. The group bringing new traits may initially be small, contributing features that can be fewer in number than those of the already local culture. The emerging combined group may then initiate a recurrent, expansionist process of ethnic and language shift. David Anthony notes that the spread of the Indo-European languages probably did not happen through "chain-type folk migrations", but by

16480-430: 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

16640-452: 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

16800-507: 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

16960-497: The end of the Bronze Age large states, whose armies imposed themselves on people with a different culture, and are often called empires, had arisen in Egypt, China, Anatolia (the Hittites ), and Mesopotamia , all of them literate. The Iron Age is not part of prehistory for all civilizations who had introduced written records during the Bronze Age. Most remaining civilizations did so during

17120-625: The end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently, in the 1870s, when the Russian anthropologist Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai spent several years living among native peoples, and described their way of life in a comprehensive treatise. In Europe the relatively well-documented classical cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome had neighbouring cultures, including the Celts and the Etruscans , with little writing. Historians debate how much weight to give to

17280-431: The family, while 68% with friends. A much lower percentage reported to use it at work (35%); the local language is less used in formal situations. However, the frequency of use within the family networks and friendship stopped respectively at -4 and -11 percentage points, suggesting a slow morphing to Italian, while the use in the workplace dropped to -22 percentage points. A visible generational gap has also been noted, since

17440-668: The federal state of Schleswig-Holstein . Cumans , seeking refuge from the Mongols , settled in Hungary and were later Magyarized . The Jassic people of Hungary originally spoke the Jassic dialect of Ossetic , but they fully adopted Magyar , forgetting their former language. The territory of today's Hungary was formerly settled by Slavonic tribes, which gradually assimilated to Magyar. Also, language shift may have happened in Hungarian pre-history, as

17600-446: The few mines, stimulating the creation of extensive trading routes. In many areas as far apart as China and England, the valuable new material was used for weapons, but for a long time apparently not available for agricultural tools. Much of it seems to have been hoarded by social elites, and sometimes deposited in extravagant quantities, from Chinese ritual bronzes and Indian copper hoards , to European hoards of unused axe-heads. By

17760-493: The first organized settlements and blossoming of artistic work. Throughout the Palaeolithic, humans generally lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers . Hunter-gatherer societies tended to be very small and egalitarian, although hunter-gatherer societies with abundant resources or advanced food-storage techniques sometimes developed sedentary lifestyles with complex social structures such as chiefdoms, and social stratification . Long-distance contacts may have been established, as in

17920-444: The first signs of deforestation have been found, although this would only begin in earnest during the Neolithic, when more space was needed for agriculture . The Mesolithic is characterized in most areas by small composite flint tools: microliths and microburins . Fishing tackle , stone adzes , and wooden objects such as canoes and bows have been found at some sites. These technologies first occur in Africa, associated with

18080-435: 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,

18240-474: 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

18400-496: The inhabitants south of the line Villach - Klagenfurt - Diex spoke Slovene as their native language. In the course of the 19th century, this number fell significantly. By 1920, a third of the population of the area had already shifted to German as their main language of communication. After the Carinthian Plebiscite in the 1920s, and especially after World War II , most of the population shifted from Slovene to German. In

18560-467: The introduction of agriculture , the date of which varied by geographic region. In some areas, such as the Near East , agriculture was already underway by the end of the Pleistocene , and there the Mesolithic is short and poorly defined. In areas with limited glacial impact, the term " Epipalaeolithic " is preferred. Regions that experienced greater environmental effects as the last ice age ended have

18720-581: The introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites, which are emulated by large groups of people. Anthony explains: Language shift can be understood best as a social strategy through which individuals and groups compete for positions of prestige, power, and domestic security ... What is important, then, is not just dominance, but vertical social mobility and a linkage between language and access to positions of prestige and power ... A relatively small immigrant elite population can encourage widespread language shift among numerically dominant indigenes in

18880-498: The island's indigenous languages have by now been therefore largely replaced by Italian; the language contact ultimately resulted in the emergence of a specific variety of Italian , slightly divergent from the standard one. Due to language shift, ethnographic borders of Lithuanian language from the Middle Ages to the late 1930s shrank sharply to the north and west from the territory what is now Grodno oblast in Belarus , giving way to

19040-474: The keeping of dogs , sheep , and goats . By about 6,900–6,400 BCE, it included domesticated cattle and pigs, the establishment of permanently or seasonally inhabited settlements, and the use of pottery . The Neolithic period saw the development of early villages , agriculture , animal domestication , tools , and the onset of the earliest recorded incidents of warfare. Settlements became more permanent, some with circular houses made of mudbrick with

19200-487: The late 19th century. Since the times of the Renaissance , a trans-Italian language was developed in central Italy , based on Florentine Tuscan ; in light of its cultural prestige, it was used for formal, literary and written purposes among the literate classes from the various states of mainland Italy, Sicily and Corsica (France), sidelining the other dialects in education and formal settings. Thus, literary Florentine

19360-535: The lifetime of a person, or most often across generations. When a speech-community ceases to use their original language, language death is said to occur. In the context of the Indo-European migrations, it has been noted that small groups can change a larger cultural area. Michael Witzel refers to Ehret's model "which stresses the osmosis , or a "billiard ball," or Mallory 's Kulturkugel , effect of cultural transmission." According to Ehret, ethnicity and language can shift with relative ease in small societies, due to

19520-423: The local dialects ( Basilicata , 69.4%; Calabria 68.6%; Campania, 75.2%; Sicily, 68.8%). Trentino 's Cimbrian , a Germanic language related to Bavarian , was spoken by at least 20,000 people in the 19th century, with 3,762 people in 1921 and fewer than 300 in 2007. The same scenario goes for Mòcheno and Walser . Unlike the neighbouring island of Corsica (France) and elsewhere in today's Italy, where Italian

19680-637: The metal used earlier, more heat is required. Once the technical challenge had been solved, iron replaced bronze as its higher abundance meant armies could be armed much more easily with iron weapons. All dates are approximate and conjectural, obtained through research in the fields of anthropology , archaeology, genetics , geology , or linguistics . They are all subject to revision due to new discoveries or improved calculations. BP stands for " Before Present (1950)." BCE stands for " Before Common Era ". German language German (German: Deutsch , pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] )

19840-669: The mixed language Petuh combining Danish and German elements. As late as in 1851 (in the period of nationalization) the Danish government tried to stop the language shift, but without success in the long run. After the Second Schleswig War the Prussians introduced a number of language policy measures in the opposite direction to expand the use of (High) German as the language of administration, schooling and church services. Today, Danish and North Frisian are recognized as minority languages in

20000-402: 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

20160-626: The native Germanic dialect has been declining after a period of being banned at school by the French government after the First World War and the Second World War . It is being replaced by French. French Flanders , which gradually became part of France between 1659 and 1678, was historically part of the Dutch sprachraum , the native dialect being West Flemish ( French Flemish ). This is corroborated by

20320-401: The nature and behavior of pre-literate and non-literate peoples. Human population geneticists and historical linguists are also providing valuable insight. Cultural anthropologists help provide context for societal interactions, by which objects of human origin pass among people, allowing an analysis of any article that arises in a human prehistoric context. Therefore, data about prehistory

20480-630: 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

20640-533: The perception of population as Lithuanian language was seen as of lower status by its peripheral speakers as well as deliberate policy by German and Russian imperial administrations, notably – a 40-year ban on Lithuanian language and press by the Tsarist government . In Lithuania Minor , where Lithuanian culture began to decline after The Great Plague between 1708 and 1711, Kristijonas Donelaitis ' poem – The Seasons addressed this issue. In Northern Poland during

20800-459: The prehistoric culture of Magyars shows very little similarity to that of speakers of other Uralic languages . In India, many languages are assimilated into standard language like Hindi , Bengali and other administrative languages. For example, the Austroasiatic -speaking Bhumij tribe for over two centuries nearly abandoned their native language and adopted Bengali and Odia instead. Today,

20960-457: The prewar era and especially the postwar era and the "escape from the countryside" of the 1960s changed the demography of the major cities and led to Finnish dominating. While Helsinki was a predominantly Swedish-speaking city prior to the turn of the 20th century, the Swedish-speaking minority is now about 6% of the population. In Alsace , France , a longtime Alsatian -speaking region,

21120-462: 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

21280-430: The province of Guangdong the cultural influence of Cantonese has meant local dialects and languages are being abandoned for Cantonese instead. Languages like Tujia and Evenki are also disappearing due to language shift. In Hong Kong , Cantonese has become the dominant language spoken in society since widespread immigration to Hong Kong began in the 1940s. With immigrants of differing mother tongues, communication

21440-624: The region's linguistic heritage. Like the aforementioned case of Northeast Italy, even in Southern Italy and Sicily the local dialects from the Italo-Dalmatian family are widely used in combination with standard Italian, depending upon the social context. More specifically, Italian as the prevalent language spoken among family members is spoken the least in Campania (20.7%), Calabria (25.3%) and Sicily (26.6%), contrary to frequency of use of

21600-658: The regions and civilizations who developed a system of keeping written records during later periods. The invention of writing coincides in some areas with the beginnings of the Bronze Age. After the appearance of writing, people started creating texts including written records of administrative matters. The Bronze Age refers to a period in human cultural development when the most advanced metalworking (at least in systematic and widespread use) included techniques for smelting copper and tin from naturally occurring outcroppings of ores, and then combining them to cast bronze . These naturally occurring ores typically included arsenic as

21760-502: The rise of metallurgy, and most Neolithic societies on the whole were relatively simple and egalitarian. Most clothing appears to have been made of animal skins, as indicated by finds of large numbers of bone and antler pins which are ideal for fastening leather. Wool cloth and linen might have become available during the later Neolithic, as suggested by finds of perforated stones that (depending on size) may have served as spindle whorls or loom weights. In Old World archaeology,

21920-417: The same region, today only some 13% of the people speak Slovene, while more than 85% of the population speak German. The figures for the whole region are equally telling: in 1818, around 35% of the population of Carinthia spoke Slovene; by 1910, this number had fallen to 15.6% and by 2001 to 2.3%. These changes were almost entirely the result of a language shift in the population, with emigration and genocide (by

22080-583: The sometimes biased accounts in Greek and Roman literature, of these protohistoric cultures. In dividing up human prehistory in Eurasia, historians typically use the three-age system, whereas scholars of pre-human time periods typically use the well-defined geologic record and its internationally defined stratum base within the geologic time scale . The three-age system is the periodization of human prehistory into three consecutive time periods , named for their predominant tool-making technologies: Stone Age , Bronze Age and Iron Age . In some areas, there

22240-424: The southern parts of Schleswig. Added to this was the influence of German-speaking Holsatian nobility and traders. German was (occasionally) also spoken at the royal court in Copenhagen. This political and economic development led gradually to a German language dominating in the southern parts of Schleswig. Native dialects such as the Angel Danish and Eiderstedt Frisian vanished. In the Flensburg area, there arose

22400-427: The spreading Polish and Belarusian languages , while in Prussian Lithuania out of 10 administrative units with prevailing Lithuanian language in the early 1800s, only the extreme northern part – Klaipėda region had still relative Lithuanian language majority in the 1910s with all the eastern and southern territories in some hundred or so years almost fully Germanized . These processes were happening both because of

22560-492: 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,

22720-473: The students and young people under the age of 25 are the social group where the use of dialect fell below the threshold of absolute majority (respectively 43 and 41%). Nonetheless, despite some tendencies signalling the slow advancement of standard Italian, the local dialects of Veneto and the Province of Trieste are still widely spoken alongside Italian; like in much of Italy, the presence of Italian in Northeast Italy does not seem to take anything away from

22880-560: The term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently. In the early Bronze Age , Sumer in Mesopotamia , the Indus Valley Civilisation , and ancient Egypt were the first civilizations to develop their own scripts and keep historical records, with their neighbours following. Most other civilizations reached their end of prehistory during the following Iron Age . The three-age division of prehistory into Stone Age , Bronze Age , and Iron Age remains in use for much of Eurasia and North Africa , but

23040-449: 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

23200-520: The time of Classical Antiquity. Another example is during the Middle Ages, when shifting from Aramaic to Arabic through the advent of Islam. A third shift took place in Modern times, under the influence of Zionism , from Jewish languages such as Yiddish , Ladino and various dialects of Judeo-Arabic to Modern Hebrew . The Italian peninsula , the Po river basin and the nearby islands are home to various languages , most of which are Latin-derived. Italy would be politically organized into states until

23360-532: The use and provenance of materials, and genetic analysis of bones to determine kinship and physical characteristics of prehistoric peoples. The beginning of prehistory is normally taken to be marked by human-like beings appearing on Earth. The date marking its end is typically defined as the advent of the contemporary written historical record. Both dates consequently vary widely from region to region. For example, in European regions, prehistory cannot begin before c.  1.3  million years ago, which

23520-434: The use of English words in Maltese sentences. Trends show that English is becoming the language of choice for more and more people, and is transforming the Maltese language. Urdu, the lingua franca of South Asian Muslims and the official and national language of Pakistan since its independence, is spoken by most educated Pakistanis . Despite positive attitudes towards Punjabi in the urban areas of Pakistani Punjab , there

23680-404: The whole area. "Palaeolithic" means "Old Stone Age", and begins with the first use of stone tools . The Paleolithic is the earliest period of the Stone Age . It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools by hominins c.  3.3  million years ago, to the end of the Pleistocene c.  11,650   BP (before the present period). The early part of the Palaeolithic

23840-423: The world as a result of language change in urban settings. These factors lead to phenomena such as dialect levelling, koineization , and/or language shift toward a dominant language. Historical examples for status shift are the early Welsh and Lutheran Bible translations . Until the mid-19th century, southern Carinthia in Austria had an overwhelming Slovene -speaking majority: in the 1820s, around 97% of

24000-438: 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

24160-415: 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

24320-429: 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

24480-417: Was a language shift from the 17th to the 20th centuries from Danish and North Frisian dialects to Low German and later High German. Historically, most of the region was part of the Danish and North Frisian language area, adjacent in the south to the German-speaking Holstein. But with the Reformation in the 16th century German became the language of the Church, and in the 19th century also that of schools in

24640-407: 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

24800-571: Was established as the most representative dialect of Italy long before its political unification in 1861, Tuscan having been officially adopted by the preunitarian states. Italian further expanded as a common language for everyday use throughout the country after World War II. Most other languages, with the exception of those spoken by specific ethno-linguistic groups , long served as local vernaculars alongside Italian; therefore they have been mislabelled "dialects" by their own speakers, but they are still usually spoken just as much as standard Italian in

24960-427: 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

25120-420: Was hard without a dominant language. Cantonese originated from the capital of neighboring Canton province, and it became the dominant language by extension, and other similar dialects started to vanish from use in Hong Kong. Original residents, or aboriginals, of Hong Kong used their own languages including the Tanka , Hakka and Waitau dialect , but with a majority of Hong Kong's population being immigrants by

25280-419: Was long employed as a conglomerate of local vernaculars in combination with Italian , the official language in Corsica until 1859; afterwards Italian was replaced by French, owing to the acquisition of the island by France from Genoa in 1768. Over the next two centuries, the use of French grew to the extent that, by the Liberation in 1945, all islanders had a working knowledge of French. The 20th century saw

25440-418: Was the standard language shared by the various local elites since the late Middle Ages, Italian was first officially introduced to Sardinia, to the detriment of both Spanish and Sardinian (the only surviving Neo-Latin language from the Southern branch ), only in 1760 and 1764 by the then-ruling House of Savoy , from Piedmont . Because of the promotion and enforcement of the Italian language and culture upon

25600-410: Was under Swedish rule from the Middle Ages until 1809, the language of education was Swedish , with Finnish being allowed as a medium of education at the university only in the 19th century, and the first thesis in Finnish being published in 1858. Several of the coastal cities were multilingual; Viipuri had newspapers in Swedish , Finnish , Russian and German . However, the industrialization in

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