- The German language was established during the migration period of the High German consonant shift. It was during this time that the Old High German and Old Saxon dialects were separated. Because Germany had been divided into several different states, there was only one common force at work that was trying to unify and standardize the German language. This standardization attempt unfolded over a period of several hundred years and was the result of writers who were attempting to hone their skill and write in a way that would be understood in largest area possible.
- More than 95 percent of Germany's population speak German, as it is considered the native tongue of that region. Approximately 89 percent of Austria's population speaks German, while 64 percent of Switzerland's population speaks it. However, German speakers are not confined to these areas. There are other European communities where German is spoken, such as Italy, the French area of Alsace and Belgium's East Cantons. There are also some communities that speak German in the Czech Republic, Romania, Kazakhstan, Poland, Russia and Hungary.
- Standard German was primarily a written language until around 1800. During this time, there was a large group of people in urban Northern Germany whose dialects were quite different from those of Standard German. These people learned to speak Standard German and treated it almost as if it was a foreign language. They attempted to pronounce Standard German as close to its spelling as possible.
- In 1996, seven years after the fall of the Berlin wall, there was a German spelling reform that resulted in considerable dispute and public controversy. State Parliaments such as North Rhine Westphalia, Bavaria and Bundeslander, would not accept the reform. Because of the reluctance to accept the reform, the dispute ended up in the highest court. As a result, the court decided that the states would make the decision on whether to accept the spelling reform and or not and, additionally, only schools could make the reform into an official rule. This meant that all others could keep on writing the language as they had learned it.
- Though German is spoken in quite a few European countries, there are also places outside of the former Soviet Union and Europe where German is widely spoken. Some large German-speaking communities can be found in Argentina, the United States, Brazil and Canada, though it is certainly unlikely that German would ever be spoken in these countries on a large scale. German became entrenched in these cultures because of a large-scale German migration over the last 200 years. Presently, though, many of the descendants no longer speak the German language and instead only speak the native tongue of these particular countries.
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