It is the most spoken native language within the European Union. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany , Austria , Switzerland , Liechtenstein , and the Italian autonomous province of South Tyrol.
It is also an official language of Luxembourg , Belgium and the Italian autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia , as well as a recognized national language in Namibia. Overseas, sizeable communities of German-speakers are found in Brazil Blumenau and Pomerode , South Africa Kroondal , Namibia , among others, some communities have decidedly Austrian German or Swiss German characters e. Pozuzo , Peru. German is one of the major languages of the world.
German is the second-most widely spoken Germanic language , after English, both as a first and as a second language. German is also widely taught as a foreign language , especially in continental Europe where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French , and in the United States. Overall, German is the fourth most commonly learned second language, [ 11 ] and the third most commonly learned second language in the United States in K education.
It is the second most commonly used language in science [ 13 ] and the third most widely used language on websites. German is most closely related to other West Germanic languages, namely Afrikaans , Dutch , English , the Frisian languages , and Scots. It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic group , such as Danish , Norwegian , and Swedish.
German is an inflected language , with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives nominative, accusative, genitive, dative ; three genders masculine, feminine, neuter and two numbers singular, plural. It has strong and weak verbs. The majority of its vocabulary derives from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, while a smaller share is partly derived from Latin and Greek , along with fewer words borrowed from French and Modern English. English, however, is the main source of more recent loanwords.
