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German is the most widely spoken language throughout Europe
as a native language with around 110 million Europeans speaking
it even in neighbouring countries such as the Benelux states,
Italy, France, Liechtenstein, and Denmark and in Eastern
European countries such as Slovenia, Slovakia, Rumania,
Hungary, Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic.
Within
the European Union, German is the second most widely used
language (as a first or second language), being spoken by
32% of Europeans: 24% use it as their native tongue while
the other 8% speak German as a foreign language.
Modern
German belongs to a group of Germanic languages (which includes
the Scandinavian languages, Dutch, Flemish and English)
descending from a common ancestor which in turn belongs
to the family of Indo-European languages.
Standard German comes from the Saxon dialect,
used by Martin Luther to translate the Bible in the early
16th Century. This leader of the Reform chose to use this
dialect as he himself came from the Saxony region and because
Saxon combined elements of the dialects spoken in all the
Germanic speaking regions. Later this would be the language
that writers such as Goethe and Schiller; great thinkers
such as Kant and Nietzsche; and musicians such as Mozart,
Beethoven and Bach would use to express themselves in.
