The German language is one of the most widely spoken and historically rich languages in Europe with over 133 million German speakers worldwide. In fact, its close history with the formation of English puts the German language on the easier side of language difficulty rankings worldwide. You can expect that Modern Standard German didn’t suddenly appear out of the highlands of Germany one day. Rather, it’s the result of thousands of years of linguistic evolution brought on by geography, war, culture—and everything in between.
If you find the history of a language to be as important as its usage, you can learn a brief history of the German language and some of its key factors here.
Table of Contents
A quick timeline of the history of German
As you scroll through the rich history of the German language’s origin, it can be helpful to get a bird’s eye view of the whole process. In short, the history of Modern Standard German is a process of slowly adapting languages and dialects from the Indo-European language family.
Here are the six dialects that produced Modern Standard German, from oldest to the present day, along with their approximate years of usage:
- Proto-Germanic → 500 BC-200 AD
- West Germanic → 200 AD-750 AD
- Old High German → 750 AD-1050 AD
- Middle High German → 1050 AD-1350 AD
- Early New High German → 1350 AD-1650 AD
- Modern Standard German → 1650 AD-present
Refer back to this list as you learn about the origins of the German language if you find yourself needing more historical context.
Roots of the German language
The first recorded history of Germanic languages comes from the Romans in the year 98 BC, when they made contact with tribes as they crossed the Rhine River in mainland Europe. The Romans decided to call this land “Germania,” so the tribes within were called “Germanic.”
These Germanic tribes, of course, already had their own language by the time the Romans discovered them. Their original language was called “Proto-Germanic,” meaning “the earliest form of German.” Here’s where our history of the German language begins.
Going from Proto-Germanic to Old High German
Originally, Proto-Germanic was spoken by people living on the northern coasts of what is now Germany and the southern coasts of the Scandinavian peninsula. Over time, as cultures formed into separate tribes, Proto-Germanic split into three main Germanic dialects:
- North Germanic
- East Germanic
- West Germanic
West Germanic will become the main character of our German language history for a few hundred years. Speakers of West Germanic who lived in the highlands of southern Germany adjusted to what is now referred to as the High German Consonant Shift, also known as the Zweite Lautverschiebung (second sound shift).
Some letter changes that occurred from the Zweite Lautverschiebung include:
- p → pf/ff,
- t → ss/z,
- k → ch
- d → t
For example, the Latin word pater (father) started sounding like the more Modern German word Vater (father), which is pronounced like “fahter.” The language of people who adopted these consonant changes and lived in the highlands of southern Germany between 750 AD and 1050 AD is now officially called Old High German!
Middle High German and the rise of literature
Mittlehochdeutsch (Middle High German) was spoken between circa 1050 AD and 1350 AD in the highlands of what is now modern Germany. This period of time saw grammatical evolutions to Germanic dialects as well as the emergence of a more standardized writing system. While spoken dialects remained regional and fragmented, more “courtly” writings were produced in Mittlehochdeutsch which had much more consistent spelling and grammar rules.
This was a time of flowering literary composition, with mysterious fairy tales, heroic legends, and Minnesang (love poetry) being written by the creative titans of Germany’s Middle Ages. Some lasting examples of Middle High German writing include:
- Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
- Nibelungenlied
The standardization of Middle High German and the beauty of the writings created within this dialect both enriched German vocabulary and cemented Germanic languages as legitimate literary languages. If you study it closely, you’ll see that it set the stage for future developments towards the official standardization of Modern Standard German.
The birth of Modern Standard German
Did you know that Modern Standard German, also known as Standardhochdeutsch (Standard High German), owes its existence to Martin Luther? This famous devout German is famous for his 95 Theses, but in 1522, he also translated the New Testament from the Bible of the Christian church into a widely understood dialect of High German called East Central German. Now people in mainland Europe were able to read the Bible on their own without expensive education in Latin or other academic languages.
This, combined with the invention of the printing press, made Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible widely available and understandable by most Europeans in Germania. Therefore, High German dialects started to become the standard for grammar, spelling, and vocabulary across German-speaking countries.
While Standardhochdeutsch has never officially been declared the language of Germany, this gradually unified the German language—both spoken and written—across Germania. Today, it remains the basis for the officially spoken language of Germany.
German dialects and where you’ll hear them
Today, while all Germans are taught Standardhochdeutsch in schools and speak this dialect in government, schools, and so on, it’s not the only dialect in Germany by a long mile. The Austrian and German languages, for example, are very similar but with distinct grammatical and vocabulary differences.
Generally, German dialects within the nation of Germany are divided into three categories:
- Low German
- Middle German
- High German
Many people mistakenly think “low,” “middle,” and “high” is a reference to social class or level of official German language use. The truth is actually much simpler.
- Low German is spoken in the lowlands of northern Germany.
- Middle German is spoken in the central lands of Germany
- High German is spoken in the highlands of southern Germany.
In short, they refer to the geographic altitude where they’re spoken. This is an example of stereotypical German efficiency!
See the chart below to compare the vocabulary differences between Low German, Middle German, and High German when they are spoken (but not necessarily when written, which tends to be Standard German).
| Standard German Term | High German Term | Middle German Term | Low German Term | English Translation |
| Kind | Kinda | Kinn | Kinn | child |
| essen | essn | esse | äten | eating |
| Haus | Haus | Huss | Huus | house |
| Mädchen | Madl | Mädche | Deem | girl |
| ja | ja | jo | jo | yes |
| ich | i | isch | ik | I |
| Kuh | Kia | Kuu | Kau | cow |
| haben | habm | hawwe | hebben | having |
3 ways the German language is grammatically different from other languages
Now that you have an understanding of how the German language came to be, let’s break down the parts of German that are unique. While you can see comparisons of grammar and spelling among the Romance languages, German grammar has a few differences from English that are worth noting from word order to cases.
1. Flexible word and sentence building in German
Creativity and self-expression are made easy in the German language because of the flexibility a German-speaking person is allowed in the language. German grammar allows for more constructions of a sentence than English does, with clauses being flexible in their positioning.
See the sentence examples below to see a number of ways one sentence can be formed and still make perfect sense to a German, even if they don’t in English:
- Er will heute nicht zur Schule gehen. = He does not want to go to school today.
- Heute will er nicht zur Schule gehen. = Today wants he not to school go.
- Zur Schule will er heute nicht gehen. = To school wants he today not to go.
See how much more flexible German sentences are than English? While the second two sentences don’t make much sense when directly translated into English, these syntaxes make perfect sense in German.
Otherwise, you are given more creative license to form new, long German words by stacking several smaller German words together. This leads to the German language having some of the longest words in the world, and the speakers of German being able to come up with highly specific and expressive terms like Waldeneinsamkeit, meaning “the feeling of being alone in the woods.” What would you do with all of that freedom and linguistic power?
2. German uses gendered nouns
What if, grammatically speaking, a chair had a gender? While this is a silly thing to propose in English, German has three genders in its grammar. If you’ve learned Spanish or one of the other Romance languages, you might know what we’re referring to. Every single noun you can imagine, whether it’s living or not, belongs to one of these three categories in German:
- masculine
- feminine
- neuter
These grammatical genders aren’t just extra details; they’re a vital part of how to learn German. To see the impact of gender in German grammar, see the following table of different definite and indefinite articles associate with each gender along with noun examples below:
| Gender | Definite Article | Indefinite Article | German Noun Example |
| masculine | der | ein | der Tisch (the table) |
| feminine | die | eine | die Blume (the flower) |
| neuter | das | ein | das Buch (the book) |
Consider taking one of Rosetta Stone’s German language courses or tutoring services to find out more about this central component of the German language.
3. The four grammatical cases that are unique to German
German cases are the secret behind German’s flexible language structure. Because of the changes in articles and declensions they cause, one can mix up word order quite a bit and still understand how things relate to each other.
There are a total of four cases in the German language:
- nominativ = nominative
- akkusativ = accusative
- dativ = dative
- genitiv = genitive
As you can see, there are the same number of cases in German as there are in English—and they even are spelled similarly. This is because of the close historical backgrounds English and German share, making German easy to learn for native English speakers. The difference is that the cases in English are far less noticeable (or changeable) since they are seen only in pronouns rather than nouns, pronouns, articles, and adjectives in German.
While German cases have far-reaching impacts on grammar, an easy way to get started with them is by looking at how each case affects gendered articles. See this core component of German grammar in the table below:
| Case | Masculine | Feminine | Neuter | Plural |
| nominative | der | die | das | die |
| accusative | den | die | das | die |
| dative | dem | der | dem | den |
| genitive | des | der | des | der |
Frequently asked questions about the history and use of German
The German language has a rich history in the mainland of Europe spanning thousands of years. Here are the three most frequently asked questions about the history and usage of the German language:
When were umlauts first used in German?
Umlauts were first used in German during the Old High German period between the eighth and ninth centuries. The sound changes these diacritical marks represent developed much sooner during the Proto-Germanic period. Umlauts originally appeared as a wide range of symbols above certain vowels until they were standardized and named by Jacob Grimm of The Brothers Grimm in 1819.
Which languages influenced German the most?
A wide range of languages influenced the German language as it formed, particularly Latin, French, Italian, English, and Slavic languages. Latin provided the most structural influence due to its close cultural proximity to Germania in terms of religious, legal, and scholarly applications during Roman rule and the Christianization of the Germanic tribes.
When did German first become a written language?
German first became a written language around the eighth century when monks began writing Latin texts with German glosses. A popular example is the Old High German verse Hildesbrandslied which appeared around 800 AD. Before this, Germanic tribes used a runic alphabet. However, this alphabet was often carved as short inscriptions into trees, and therefore few examples remain today.
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