German

About German

German is the official language of Germany, Austria and Liechtenstein and one of the official languages of Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium. About 76 million people speak it as their first language and nearly 60 million more as a second language.

German has two words for "you". Use Sie, always written with a capital S, with strangers, in shops and at work, and du with friends, family and children. All nouns are written with a capital letter too. w sounds like the v in "van", v usually like f, z like the ts in "cats" and ei like the i in "wine", while ie sounds like the ee in "see". The umlauts ä, ö and ü change the sound of the vowel, and ß is a sharp s. After a, o or u the letters ch make a breathy sound like the ch in Scottish "loch".

FamilyIndo-European, West Germanic
Native speakersabout 76 million (2019)
Second-language speakersabout 58 million (2019)
Official inGermany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Belgium
ScriptLatin alphabet with ä, ö, ü and ß
Codesde (ISO 639-1), deu (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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