A
Germanic language of the
Indo-European family. German
morphology is a little more complex than in
English, in that German has more
case and
gender inflection. The four cases in German (
nominative,
accusative,
dative,
genitive) are fewer than in
case languages like
Finnish, but the four cases require an English speaker to learn new systems of
articles,
pronouns, and
suffixes. German
word order follows a subject-verb-object (
SVO) pattern.
Phonologically, English speakers have trouble with a few German
phonemes (just like Germans have trouble pronouncing the English
voiced dental fricative /þ/ -- the 'th' in 'the'). The German
vowels ä, ö and ü are new to English speakers. The German 'r' is not quite like our
palato-alveolar liquid /r/. Other sounds unusual to the English speaker are German 'ch' and 'z'.
German
words can be very long, as the
language has many very productive
derivational morphemes. All
nouns are capitalized in German. Once written in an elaborate
script called
Fraktur, German's
Roman alphabet looks like that of English, with the addition of three
vowels with
umlauts and the
scharfes S, written ß.
The German language has gone through several reforms, including a recent
spelling reform in which some
foreign words were "germanized" and the use of the ß was decreased (for example,
dass not
daß).
German is spoken much differently in
Austria and in
Switzerland than it is in Germany, and within Germany itself there are many
dialects. In
Berlin, for example, dative and accusative cases are often mixed up, and the hard 'g' in words like
gut is pronounced like the 'j' in
ja.