Ten Interesting Facts About the German Language

Did you know that:

1. German is the language with the most speakers in Europe. Not only native speakers but a lot of people learn German as a foreign language as well. Don’t forget that it is one of the most powerful languages in the field of economy and technology!

2. Are you afraid of long words? There is a word for that in German! “Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.” It’s a compound word consisting of a number of Greek-origin words meaning the fear of long words.

3. The German article consists of three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. This determines most of the endings of the words, their changes in various cases as well as the ending of the adjectives.

4. There are four cases in the declination of a noun, Nominativ, Genitv, Akkusativ, and Dativ. They change depending if the noun is a subject, an object, or comes after a preposition.

5. The word “Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän” has 42 characters and means Danube steamship company captain. Yes, there are a lot of long words in this language, and they are usually compound words.

6. The German alphabet is like the English alphabet but has some more letters ö, ä, ü and ß.

7. Do you want another long word? Maybe the longest in German? Try to pronounce “Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.” Curious to see what it means? It is the name of the German law, “Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law.” On the contrary, the shortest German word is the word “Ei,” which means “egg.”

8. German is not only spoken in Germany but in Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, and the Italian province of Tirol. It is also one of the official languages in Belgium and Luxembourg. However, there are a lot of different dialects, and the official German language, the one that we learn as a foreign language, is never spoken exactly as it is in the books.

9. Schwiizerdüütsch (Swiss German) has a lot of differences from the official German language. Sometimes you need a different course to learn it since it does not follow the grammar and pronunciation rules of the official language.

10. German belongs to the West Germanic languages. Other languages of this group are English and Dutch, that’s why there are a lot of similarities among them.