High German (Hochdeutsch) Modern standard
The German language that we know today (high German) developed from the West-Germanic languages like the English language did. As a result, German vocabulary is sometimes similar to English vocabulary. The North Germanic language eventually evolved into Danish and Swedish.
The history of High German actually dates back to 500 AD and the group of Germanic dialects we now call "Old High German." The name "high" doesn't imply any kind of superiority – it simply refers to the area where the languages were spoken, the highlands in southern Germany.
German dialects can be divided into two main groups: “high” and “low” German. These are geographical terms: people in the low-lying plains of northern Germany speak Low German (Plattdeutsch), the inhabitants of the more mountainous south speak while High German (Hochdeutsch).
East Germanic evolved into the Gothic language (with no modern language offspring), North Germanic evolved into Old Norse (from which modern Scandinavian languages come from), and West Germanic branched into Old English (from which modern English originated) and Common German (ancestor of Low and High German).
The modern English are genetically closest to the Celtic peoples of the British Isles, but the modern English are not simply Celts who speak a German language. A large number of Germans migrated to Britain in the 6th century, and there are parts of England where nearly half the ancestry is Germanic.
The Romans, Vikings and Normans may have ruled or invaded the British for hundreds of years, but they left barely a trace on our DNA, the first detailed study of the genetics of British people has revealed.
Dutch Low Saxon (Dutch Low Saxon: Nedersaksies, Dutch: Nedersaksisch) is a group of West Low German dialects spoken in the northeastern Netherlands. It is assumed to be the native language of between 1 and 2 million people in the Netherlands.
Swiss German consonants are a different case from vowels. Orthographically speaking, they are longer, whereas their pronunciation is a bit harsher than their German counterparts. For example, the Standard German /k/ becomes the famous Swiss German /ch/.
German (Standard High German: Deutsch, pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] ( listen)) is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Western Europe and Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol.
(Unless the speaker talks quickly and/or uses certain dialects.) I understand that most German speakers can follow Low German about just as easily. In either case it helps if you come from a region in Germany or the Netherlands that already has multiple dialects spoken in the area.
The varieties of German are conventionally grouped into Upper German, Central German and Low German; Upper and Central German form the High German subgroup. Standard German is a standardized form of High German, developed in the early modern period based on a combination of Central German and Upper German varieties.
Dutch is part of the West Germanic group, which also includes English, Scots, Frisian, Low German (Old Saxon) and High German. It is characterized by a number of phonological and morphological innovations not found in North or East Germanic.
Old High German, a group of dialects for which there was no standard literary language, was spoken until about 1100 in the highlands of southern Germany.
The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, all of which are now extinct. The last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken until the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
Although all Swiss German native speakers can understand High German, they almost always prefer to speak Swiss German. This is, of course, perfectly understandable, because Swiss German is the mother tongue of the majority of people living in the “German-speaking” part of Switzerland.
Modern standard High German is descended from the Middle High German dialects and is spoken in the central and southern highlands of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It is used as the language of administration, higher education, literature, and the mass media in the Low German speech area as well.
The use of High German to refer exclusively to Standard High German (after German Hochdeutsch) is sometimes avoided in scholarly discourse but may be found, especially otherwise.
As a consequence, over time, English-speaking people used the word 'Dutch' to refer to both people from Netherlands and Germany. 'High Dutch' referred to people living in the mountainous region (now southern Germany). 'Low Dutch' referred to people from the flatlands (now the Netherlands). And this is not everything.
High German came to mean the language of the educated; the old South German came to be called Oberdeutsch, 'Upper German'. High German increasingly displaced the regional dialects in the 1600's in writing, and displaced dialects from speech to some extent since the 1800's.
Austrian German (German: Österreichisches Deutsch), Austrian Standard German (ASG), Standard Austrian German (Österreichisches Standarddeutsch), or Austrian High German (Österreichisches Hochdeutsch), or simply just Austrian (Österreichisches), is the variety of Standard German written and spoken in Austria and South ...
The Welsh are the true pure Britons, according to the research that has produced the first genetic map of the UK. Scientists were able to trace their DNA back to the first tribes that settled in the British Isles following the last ice age around 10,000 years ago.
While Highland Scots are of Celtic (Gaelic) descent, Lowland Scots are descended from people of Germanic stock. During the seventh century C.E., settlers of Germanic tribes of Angles moved from Northumbria in present-day northern England and southeastern Scotland to the area around Edinburgh.
A new genetic analysis of the country has revealed which invading force had the greatest impact on its DNA. Britons share the most DNA with people from France and Germany — countries which were home to the Angles and Saxons that moved into the British Isles after Roman rule collapsed in the 4th century.