Languages of the world: German is a West Germanic language
related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an
estimated 100 million native speakers, German is one of the
world’s major languages and is the most widely-spoken first
language in the European Union. Some of it its words come from
Latin and Greek and fewer from English and French. As Germany
was divided into many different states in the 8th century AD,
the only force working for a unification or standardization of
German for several hundred years was the general wish of writers
to be understood by as many readers as possible. The 2nd
Orthographical Conference ended in 1901 with a complete
standardisation of the German language in its written form and
three years earlier the Deutsche Bühnensprache had established
rules for German. If we have a look in Europe, German is
natively spoken in Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, Switzerland,
and Luxembourg, but its use is shared with other different
languages in Switzerland and Luxembourg. In the