The German Language: Its Fascinating History, Diverse Dialects & More!
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🇩🇪 Think that German is only spoken in Germany? Or that there is only one version of the language? Think again! In this video, I share 1) the fascinating history of the German language, 2) how widespread and varied the Germanic world can be, and 3) the many reasons German is well worth learning.
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How to learn a new language with stories
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📚 GERMAN RESOURCES:
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The German Cases Explained: A 5-Part Guide To Finally Understand The Cases In German:
⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
1:04 – Old High German
2:01 – The High Germanic Sound Shift
4:44 – German Dialects in Germany
5:45 – German Dialects in Switzerland
7:15 – Other German Dialects in Europe
8:03 – A German Dialect in the US
8:46 – A German Dialect in Africa
9:29 – German Speakers in Russia
10:09 – Why is German Worth Learning?
10:56 – German Vocabulary
13:01 – German Alphabet
13:48 – German Grammar
14:40 – German Authors & Music
📜 ATTRIBUTIONS:
WIKITONGUES: Jakob speaking Zipser German
Low German with Herr Graeff
"Legal statuses of German in Europe" by 37ophiuchi is licensed under CC BY 4.0
WIKITONGUES: Anne speaking Swabian
WIKITONGUES: Julia speaking Swiss German
"Liechtenstein in Europe" by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
"Map highlighting the location of the province of South Tyrol in Italy (in red)" by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
WIKITONGUES: Vernell speaking Texas German
Bach, Air ("on the G string", string orchestra)
Die deutsche Sprache ist eine der faszinierendsten Sprachen der Welt und die Deutschen Kultur, Kunst und Wissenschaft ist hervorragend, darum lerne ich Deutsch. Ich bin Argentinischer Amerikaner.
Gracias.
Your German is pretty good 👍🏻
Ich komme aus Munich ( München) und es freud mich, dass Sie so positiv über meine Heimat Deutschland sprechen. Nochmals vielen Dank.
I war niemals stolz auf mein Land, aber ich glaube, da Sprache und Denken nicht zu trennen sind, viele deutsche Errungenschaften eben wirklich “deutsch” waren, weil deutsch gedacht wurde. Das hat nichts mit Patriotismus oder Nationalismus zu tun.
Mein Vater ist Portugiese und hat Deutsch gelernt bevor er nach Deutschland einwanderte. Er war Techniker und er lernte es, weil es die Sprache der Technik ist wie er sagte.
After studying “school book” German in highschool and at university, my first immersion experience was a summer spent working at a supermarket in Switzerland. After 3 months I came back home speaking fluent German, but amusingly to my college professors, with a Swiss accent.
Amazing!!!
Das isch doch tiptop eso, oder nid?
What was his reaction?😂
@Park Jimin – stan DKB- Grüezi
Lol!! What a shock for them
About this whole “der, die, das /einer, eine, eines”-thing: Don’t think about it too much. Yes, it exists and you should just learn it with the vocabulary when you hear it the first time to keep things easy. But it’s absolutely no problem if you’re messing it up completely in the end. Because it’s really really rarely given, that one word means two different things just seperated by different articles. And even than it’s easy to understand it by context. Think of it more like the differnece between “a” and “an”: Although “an apple” might be correct, everyone will know what you mean, if you say “a apple”.
Yepp, language is about being understood and understanding. A native speaker will have no trouble understanding what you mean by “Deine Auto steht in die Schuppen.”
@fanofboard3333 True. One of the few examples where it might be mistaken would be “das Schild” (the sign) and “der Schild” (the shield) for example. But as I said: Easy to understand by context.
Yes! Or in the morning it’s “der Weizen“ and “das Korn“ at evenings it’s “das Weizen” and “der Korn“ 😂😂
It means the grain (=Korn) and wheat (=Weizen), and the wheat beer 🍺 and rye liquor.
@B XY Der Schild sounds wierd.
I personally use for both ‘das’.
Some dialect difference again I think.
Yes and no. Yes, we will understand you if you mess up the articles. If you are just a new learner trying to ask for directions, it won’t matter. On the other hand, though, not knowing the correct article means you will make mistake after mistake scattered throughout the sentence. All adjectives, cases etc depend on the right article. If you are wrong you will spoil your whole sentence. This is much worse than a single flipped a/an. When you need to listen to this for an extended period of time, it gets really stressful and tiring because your brain is continuously on auto-correct. Don’t worry if you are making mistakes as a novice, yes. But if you are more advanced this is THE most important thing to do right if you want to improve your German.
There’s a German joke about dialects: What’s the difference between a Saxon (native of Saxony) and a foreigner? You’ll understand the foreigner if he speaks German
Another one is – My friend here speaks a different language, he speak hessian
*bavarian
I don’t get it, where’s the joke? 😉😚
@pruna blue pepper to exolain to you (I am a german btw, from central west Germany) many here joke here about saxon dialect because its sounds for us sometimes a bit silly and far even so you can still understand it pretty okay. Another example would be the “Gänsefleisch” joke.
@Cykler770 ich wohn in Bochum 😉 das war ein Witz.
One correction: the brothers Grimm did not write the fairytales, they only collected and publicated/publicized/published them.
Well, they also fudged them a bit around the edges, like turning all the evil mothers in stepmothers.
Well, if we want to be that precise, They collected the different versions of the fairytales and “averaged” them into one version per fairytale that got printed.
You mean published?
@grace3726 I thought it was the same? Can’t you use one word or the other? I am German and my language is German – sorry that’s why I ask!
@Mario Weber Hallo! Deutsch ist auch meine Muttersprache. Habe gerade erst herausgefunden, dass dieses Verb tatsächlich existiert. Ich hatte es damals bei Leo eingegeben; dieses doch recht umfangreiche Onlinewörterbuch hat es immer noch nicht gelistet, es wird also nur selten gebraucht. Mir war es bis dato nicht bekannt und ich habe seit 38 Jahren fast täglich mit Englisch zu tun. Man lernt nie aus…
This video was so nice and comforting!
I am native german speaker and I’m starting to get sick of all these people saying German is an ugly and aggressive language. Because I don’t think it is. I think our language is beautiful.
So your take on our language was very refreshing <3
i really want to learn german as a native hindi speaker, of course, i don’t mean to pressure you, but if there’s any tips you could give me that’d be greatly appreciated 🙂
@fizz jerry Oh, hey! Always nice to see someone learning my mothertongue! I would like to but I am not sure if I’d be that helpful xd
What kind of tips do you need?
@Jenna C. just pronunciation tips, honestly. and i am really passionate about germany and german culture, its such a rich and beautiful place
@fizz jerry Hm… I think first you just need to hear it often enough to have a rough idea, and then find words you can use them to learn the pronunciation. I’d recommend creating a channel to watch German YouTube channels too, that’s a big part of how I learned English. I just let YouTube auto translate it if there was something I didn’t understand. I can recommend some Youtubers I like if you want!
By the way, it’s actually really cool that you’re trying to learn German. Don’t get disgruntled if you stumble upon some problems. Or as we say here “Nicht verzagen!”
@fizz jerry Most German words (98% ?) are spoken, as they are written. That is because only 121 years ago the rules were fixed, how to write. (Main rule: write the word, as it is spoken!)
If you know, how to pronounce ä, ö, ü, r, the different ch and sch, you should be able to read a german text and be easily understood by a native speaker.
The emphasis is usually on the fist syllable of the “main” part.
(néhmen, éinnéhmen, vóreingenómmen, únvoreingenómmen, Lébensmíttelúnvertráeglichkéit)
The only problems would be foreign words like “Portemonnaie”, “Regisseur”, “Garage”, “Computer”, “Management” etc. which are spoken as in the original langage (with a german accent, if desired).
I’m so glad that German is getting more and more love on the internet, it’s such a beautiful, diverse and fascinating language!
Me, born in Germany, still not liking my own language xD
@Ghost Wolf Ich bin da ganz bei dir… nur als Österreicher =P
@Patrick Stufenberth ich meine wenn deine Sprache schon von einem Russen als aggressiv bezeichnet wird hast du definitiv etwas falsch gemacht xd
Stimmt!!!
@Ghost Wolf Das liegt daran, das wir deutsche sehr deutlich sprechen, etwas abgehackt und nicht in einem Fluss, das lässt Deutsch Miltärischaggresiv wirken
When talking about German dialects being so different that the speakers of different dialects have trouble understanding each other, one should clarify that every German learns standard German in school and almost every German (not counting a select few very uneducated hillbillies) is able to speak standard German. Many may still have a recognizable regional accent when speaking standard German and may occasionally make mistakes deriving from their regional dialect, but they generally can tune down the regional influence in their spoken language well enough that they can be understood by a German from a different region or by a foreigner who only learned standard German in school. So yeah, a Bavarian speaking Bavarian and a Northern German speaking Plattdeutsch won’t understand each other, but they can easily communicate by switching to just slightly off standard German and most Germans are polite enough to do so when they notice that a foreigner is part of the conversation and has trouble to follow.
You clearly never went to school in rural Bavaria 😂 Even at university, many of my friends from the North routinely had trouble understanding locals.
Bro, mostly old people speak with regional accents.
Ok, I do that too, but it’s just for fun or I want to trigger people who can’t understand me that way 😂
Un das mer uns do verstehe, I kann ahh hoch deitsch 😂
@unknown Flavor Exactly that was my point. I’m not saying that people don’t speak their regional accents (and ther is nothing wrong with doing so if your are amon local people), I’m saying they can tone it down to an understandable almost Hochdeutsch if they want to. The generation in which it was still more or less normal at least for rural regions to only speak dialect (and spend your whole life in the same backwards village and never get out) has almost died out. What remains are only some select few uneducated school dropout Hillbillys who actually can’t speak Hochdeutsch and some jerks who could speak Hochdeutsch but won’t do it because they like to annoy people who are not from their region (that species of lovable a*holes seem to be particularly common in Bavaria)
@Chris Rudolf I know, I was joking, it was a nice video and I learned a lot of my country, thanks a lot for sharing the informations with us 👍🏼
At work a turkish guy telled me his story. He immigrated at the age of 14 and moved to Stuttgard (swabian) and he had to learn the dialect because everyone spoke it. After 12 years he moved to Munich and had to learn a new dialect and now he is speaking Turkish, English, German and two german dialects. This guy is a savage in my eyes 🙂
That’s impressive!
You meant “warrior” by “savage” ?
A pretty important idea transported with the word “Geborgenheit” is the feeling of being protected. So it’s the idea of feeling comfortable because of being safely protected. A baby might feel “geborgen” in the arms of a parent. If you just want to convey a feeling of comfort and cosiness “Gemütlichkeit” is probably the word you are looking for.
Geborgenheit is very close to Sicherheit which means Security. Germans developed a variety of words for that like the Inuit did for snow.
Easy to understand when you spot the Germanic word “borg” in there, feeling borged not that hard to understand.
Very good explanation!
@Werner B. Except the rumor about the Inuit people having more than 30+ words for snow is completely made up 😉 It’s a fun allegory, though.
@Hurri You mean “Burg” (Castle)? That would be interesting. Never saw that connection.
German is a beautiful lyrical language. It’s so detailed and can convey specific things that are hard to otherwise spell out.
Ehre Digga!
No mention of the German community in Brazil : ( I mean, I know that there are just too many pockets of German speaking regions in the world, but I think the Brazilian-German community is probably one of the most important. German is second most spoken first language in the country and a variety of dialects have survived only due to immigration, like Pomeranian.
second most spoken? thats so cool!
I’d looove hear Brazilian-German! Brasil is extraordinary for languages ! I heard a bit about Brazilian-Japanese people, and culture, food, I love the way Brasilian people mix things and live peacefully with it 👋
It is really impressive how German spread all around the world. We also even have our own German dialect in Venezuela, that is why I started to learn it. German is such an important language as well as it has been for me one of the most beautiful and interesting languages I’ve ever begun to learn.
But in fact German didn’t really “spread” around the world. Outside the DACH countries, people that speak German on a daily basis are pretty rare nowadays.
Wow. Really?
As a foreigner living in switzerland I really had to get used to the fact, that my swiss colleagues often write e-mails and text messages in swiss-german, best described as a kind of phonetic spelling. And a lot of words are spelled completly differnt from person to person. But it is so much fun to figure out the meaning😅.
Even as someone who’s grown up here, I still sometimes have trouble deciphering something written in a different dialect. Mostly my reaction is just “oh god, they actually write it like that?” Tho when I’m talking to the same person I don’t even notice really that they are actually speaking a different dialect since I’m so used to it. While text messages definitely are written in dialect, depending on the context emails are often written in standard German unless it’s between colleagues.
“learn German” is on my list of things to do before I die. Interesting fact: if you worked in chemistry before about 2005, you really needed German. The best textbooks and journals were still published in it, and it was a sort of lingua franca. For the middle of the 20th century the same was true of physics. I still can’t get myself to use the “English equivalent” terminology. An ansatz is an ansatz and that is that.
nice
Still alive 😁?
wow i didnt know that but its not suprising considering how much chemical industry and science we have here
@SuperXD44 it’s not just that Germany has a lot of industry, German speakers drove the “chemical science phase” of the Industrial Revolution, professionalised science & engineering, and brought a mathematical and analytical rigour to engineering. Contrast with the British – the first nation to industrialise – they missed the importance of chemicals and were obsessed with the idea of the “talented amateur” . They ended up a decade behind the Germans.
I’m a german chemist who works in Denmark, and every now and then some colleague asks me to translate an old article to english or explain some synthesis protocol to them.
The reason I love my native language (German ofc) so much is because of its ability that allows us to produce chain words. It’s lovely when you’re a writer.
I’m often frustrated when I write stories in English and am unable to keep up the rhythm of my writing because of stupid English words.
My current favorite example is ‘the corners of the mouth’ vs ‘die Mundwinkel’. Its so frustrating, needing all these words to describe one noun!!
Great video! Learned something new even as a german myself 🙂 One small correction pertaining to the example of claustrophobia and “Platzangst”…while it serves well for the purpose of showing how to combine two words into one, “Platzangst” actually means the fear of wide open and especially public spaces (which in scientific terms is called agoraphobia, I think), so kind of the opposite of claustrophobia. Definitely an easy mix-up to make and one many germans do make themselves so I just thought I’d let you know 🙂
It actually has been misused so often that the meaning switched. Even the Duden defines it as fear of small rooms, when it’s not used in scientific context.
Exactly, thank you for saying it.
I lived in the then South West Africa, later Namibia, and the German spoken there was always considered very formal and quaint compared to modern German, which is what many German tourists would comment on. They would say itsounds like old fashioned Old German but with a unique dialect owing to the influence of the widely spoken Afrikaans spoken there as well.
As a German native speaker, this video was really interesting 🙂 The only variant I had trouble understanding was the Low German. I grew up in an area with an extreme dialect, and due to the geography, the dialect can change drastically just a few towns over. However, I’m extremely bad at speaking high-standard German (as in the written form). No problem writing, reading, or understanding the “proper” form. It’s just super unnatural for me to speak it. I was once asked to switch to English because the person on the other end thought I don’t speak German because of my dialect and a laggy Skype connection. Yeah, good times x)
Oh, and our super long words? They are pretty uncommon in everyday, spoken German.
I used to hate German lessons in school, it was a two year hell for me and I only remember maybe a handful of words from it. But lately I find myself more and more interested in German and want to learn it. I love how it sound, I think it’s unfair how people (even some German speakers) would say it’s rough and aggressive and to illustrate it they start to just shout words and make them sound overly harsh. Any language would sound aggressive if you scream in someone’s face -_-