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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-19th century it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire. It indicated that the speaker was a merchant, an urbanite, not his nationality.
The Franco-German friendship became the basis for the political integration of Western Europe in the European Union. In 1998–1999, Germany was one of the founding countries of the eurozone. Germany remains one of the economic powerhouses of Europe, contributing about 1/4 of the eurozone's annual gross domestic product.
Germans (German: Deutsche, pronounced [ˈdɔʏtʃə] ⓘ) are the natives or inhabitants of Germany, or sometimes more broadly any people who are of German descent or native speakers of the German language. [1][2] The constitution of Germany, implemented in 1949 following the end of World War II, defines a German as a German citizen. [3]
Scholars did not clearly differentiate between the Germanic peoples, Celtic peoples, and the "Scythian peoples" until the late 18th century with the discovery of Indo-European and the establishment of language as the primary criterion for nationality. Before that time, German scholars considered the Celtic peoples to be part of the Germanic group.
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 is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of these ...
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
Area of the early Germanic peoples. Early Germanic culture was the culture of the early Germanic peoples. The Germanic culture started to exist in the Jastorf culture located along the central part of the Elbe River in central Germany. From there it spread north to the ocean, east to the Vistula River, west to the Rhine River, and south to the ...
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. [11] 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 ...