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The Amish and some Mennonites also speak a dialect of German. Approximately 120 million people, or a quarter of all Europeans, speak German. German is the third most popular foreign language taught worldwide, and the second most popular in Europe (after English), the USA and East Asia (Japan). It is one of the official languages of the European Union.
The dialects subject to the second Germanic sound shift during medieval times are regarded as part of the modern German language.
As a consequence of the colonization patterns, the Völkerwanderung, the routes for trade and communication (chiefly the rivers), and of physical isolation (high mountains and deep forests) very different regional dialects developed. These dialects, sometimes mutually unintelligible, were used across the Holy Roman Empire.
As Germany was divided into many different states, the only force working for a unification or standardization of German during a period of several hundred years was when writers would try to write in a way that could be understood in the largest possible area.
When Martin Luther translated the Bible (the New Testament in 1521 and the Old Testament in 1534) he based his translation mainly on this already developed language, which was the most widely understood language at this time. In the beginning, copies of the Bible had a long list for each region, which translated words unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Roman Catholics rejected Luther's translation in the beginning and tried to create their own Catholic standard (Gemeines Deutsch). It took until the middle of the 18th century to create a standard that was widely accepted, thus ending the period of Early New High German.
German used to be the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-nineteenth century it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire. It indicated that the speaker was a merchant, an urbanite, not their nationality. Some cities, such as Prague and Budapest, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain. Others, such as Bratislava (Pressburg), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. A few cities such as Milano remained primarily non-German. However, most cities were primarily German during this time, such as Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, though they were surrounded by territory that spoke other languages.
Until about 1800, Standard German was almost only a written language. In this time, people in urban northern Germany, who spoke dialects very different from Standard German, learnt it almost like a foreign language and tried to pronounce it as close to the spelling as possible. Prescreptive pronunciation guides used to consider that northern German pronunciation to be the standard. However, the actual pronunciation of standard German varies from region to region.
Media and written works are almost all produced in standard German (often called Hochdeutsch in German), which is understood in all areas of German languages (except by pre-school children in areas which speak only dialect - but in this age of TV, even they now usually learn to understand Standard German before school age).
The first dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, the 16 parts of which were issued between 1852 and 1960, remains the most comprehensive guide to the words of the German language. In 1860, grammatical and orthographical rules first appeared in the Duden Handbook. In 1901, this was declared the standard definition of the German language. Official revisions of some of these rules were not issued until 1998, when the Rechtschreibreform (spelling reform) was officially promulgated by governmental representatives of all German-speaking countries. Though the Rechtschreibreform resolves quite a few inconsistencies and complex rules in German writing, public acceptance has been limited. Although the government has officially declared the old spellings "old-fashioned" and has ordered schools and government offices to stop using them, many people and a number of major German language periodicals have rejected the new forms outright. Many German speakers (especially students) are confused by the spelling rules, and there has been some public debate as to whether the new system should be cancelled altogether. See Rechtschreibreform.
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