German

German, together with English, Frisian and Dutch (including Afrikaans and Flemish), is a member of the West Germanic group within the Germanic branch of Indo-European. It is currently used by over 90 million speakers in European countries in which it has official national language status (either alone or in conjunction with other languages): the Federal Republic of Germany, united as of 1990 with the former German Democratic Republic (almost 80 million users); Austria (7.5 million); Switzerland (4.2 million); Luxembourg (360,000 users of the Lëtzebuergesch dialect); and Liechtenstein (15,000). Bordering on the official German-language areas there are some sizable Germanspeaking minorities in Western Europe: Alsace (perhaps 1 million users); Lorraine (some 300,000); South Tirol and other parts of Italy (270,000); and Belgium (up to 90,000). In Eastern Europe there were, until recently at least, as many as two million people with German as their mother tongue: in the former Soviet Union (1.2 million); Romania (400,000); Hungary (250,000); the former Czechoslovakia (100,000); Poland (20,000); and the former Yugoslavia (20,000). Outside Europe, German is an ethnic minority language in numerous countries to

which Germans have emigrated. The extent to which German is still used by these groups varies, and in all cases there is gradual assimilation to the host language from one generation to the next. Nonetheless, there may be as many as nine million people who consider German their mother tongue in countries such as the following: USA (6.1 million according to the 1970 census); Brazil (1.5 million); Canada (561,000); Argentina (400,000); Australia (135,000); South Africa (50,000); Chile (35,000); and Mexico (17,000). Between one and three million of the German speakers outside the official German-speaking countries speak Yiddish, or Judaeo-German, which has undergone strong lexical influence from Hebrew and Slavonic. About half of them live in the USA. Some 300,000 Americans are native speakers of a variant of German called Pennsylvania German or Pennsylvania Dutch. Map 4.1 gives an indication of the major regional dialects of German within Europe.

There are three main groupings of these dialects: Low German in the north (comprising

North Lower Saxon, Westphalian etc.); Central German (comprising Middle Franconian, Rhine Franconian, Thuringian etc.); and Upper German in the south (comprising Swabian, Alemannic etc.). The major basis for the threefold division involves the extent to which the Second

Sound Shift of the Old High German period was carried out (cf. below for discussion of the historical periods of German). It changed voiceless stops p, t, k to voiceless