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German-speaking people living abroad (and people wanting to learn German) can visit the websites of German-language newspapers and TV- and radio stations. The free software MediathekView allows the downloading of videos from the websites of some public German, Austrian, and Swiss TV stations and of the public Franco-German TV network ARTE.
The German endonym Deutsche is derived from the Old High German term diutisc, which means "ethnic" or "relating to the people". This term was used for speakers of West-Germanic languages in Central Europe since at least the 8th century, after which time a distinct German ethnic identity began to emerge among at least some them living within the ...
The following is a list of the countries and territories where German is an official language (also known as the Germanosphere). It includes countries that have German as (one of) their nationwide official language (s), as well as dependent territories with German as a co-official language.
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.
The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. [13] The German term Deutschland, originally diutisciu land ('the German lands'), is derived from deutsch (cf. Dutch), descended from Old High German diutisc 'of the people' (from diot or diota 'people'), originally used to distinguish the language of ...
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, German, French, Italian, and English. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, [4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe.)
German is the main language of about 90 million people (18%) in the EU. 67% of German citizens claim to be able to communicate in at least one foreign language, 27% in at least two languages other than their first.
Mostly depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties with a disputed status as separate languages or which were later acknowledged as separate languages (e.g., Low German/Plautdietsch [1]), it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language, [2] [3] [4] 10–25 million as a second language ...