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German: Languages
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German is the official language of Germany, where it is spoken by 75 million people, and of Austria, where it is has 7.5 million speakers. It is one of the official languages of Liechtenstein, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Italy. It is used as a local official language in German-speaking regions of Belgium, Italy, Denmark, and Poland. It is ... spoken in Namibia, a former German colony in Africa, in several Eastern European countries, and in the Americas. In the U.S., the Amish and some Mennonites speak a dialect of German. Ethnologue estimates that there are 28,000,000 second-language speakers of German worldwide.
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The German language is spoken by over 100 million Europeans and as the mother tongue of Europe’s biggest trading country is very important to modern businesses. German is the official language of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein and is ... spoken as both a first and second language in Italy, Argentina and Brazil among others. It is thought that German translation accounts for the most written translations into and from any language.
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Like most Germanic languages, German forms left-branching noun compounds, where the first noun modifies the category given by the second, e.g. Hundehaus (eng. doghouse) or Sommerzeit (eng. summertime). Unlike English, where newer compounds or combinations of longer nouns are often written in open form with separating spaces, German (like the other German languages) always uses the closed form without spaces, e.g., Baumhaus (eng. tree house). Like English, German allows arbitrarily long compounds, but these are rare.
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The number of German publications reached its peak in 1894 at 800 and began a rapid decline hinging on the political tension in Europe. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of German-language publications in America dropped from 554 to 234. Subscribers fell away, especially with President Wilson's declaration of war in 1917, and many were not won back even at war's end.
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Until about 1800, standard German was almost only a written language. At this time, people in urban northern Germany, who spoke dialects very different from Standard German, learned it almost like a foreign language and tried to pronounce it as close to the spelling as possible. Prescriptive pronunciation guides used to consider northern German pronunciation to be the standard. However, the actual pronunciation of standard German varies from region to region.
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German was once the lingua franca of central, eastern and northern Europe. Increasing influence from the English language has affected German recently. However, German remains one of the most popular foreign languages taught worldwide, and is more popular than French as a foreign language in Europe. 38% of all European citizens say they can converse in German (native speakers not counted).
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