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Old High German (OHG; German: Althochdeutsch (Ahdt., Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally identified as the period from around 500/750 to 1050. Rather than representing a single supra-regional form of German, Old High German encompasses the numerous West Germanic dialects that had undergone the set of consonantal ...
German dialects are the various traditional local varieties of the German language.Though varied by region, those of the southern half of Germany beneath the Benrath line are dominated by the geographical spread of the High German consonant shift, and the dialect continuum that connects German to the neighboring varieties of Low Franconian and Frisian.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 16 January 2025. West Germanic language family This article is about the family of regional language varieties. For the Standard High German language, see Standard German. High German Geographic distribution German-speaking Europe, United States, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Colonia Tovar ...
German is the official language of six countries, all of which lie in central and western Europe. These countries (with the addition of South Tyrol of Italy) also form the Council for German Orthography and are referred to as the German Sprachraum (German language area). Since 2004, Meetings of German-speaking countries have been held annually ...
The Germanic languages include some 58 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects that originated in Europe; this language family is part of the Indo-European language family. Each subfamily in this list contains subgroups and individual languages. The standard division of Germanic is into three branches: East Germanic languages; North Germanic ...
This article details the geographical distribution of speakers of the German language, regardless of the legislative status within the countries where it is spoken.In addition to the Germanosphere (German: Deutscher Sprachraum) in Europe, German-speaking minorities are present in many other countries and on all six inhabited continents.
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.
Lastly, one can perceive the Transylvanian Saxon dialect, bearing in mind its conservative character when compared to other dialects of the German language (due primarily to its geographic isolation from other German idioms) as a type of German spoken in medieval times, or, more specifically as Old High German or Middle High German.