German

German

the official language of Germany and Austria and one of the official languages of Switzerland; the native language of approximately 100 million people. It is an Indo-European language belonging to the West Germanic branch, closely related to English and Dutch. There is considerable diversity of dialects; modern standard German is a development of Old High German, influenced by Martin Luther's translation of the Bible
www.goethe.de/enindex.htm

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(human language)

German - \j*r'mn\ A human language written (in latin alphabet) and spoken in Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland. German writing normally uses four non-ASCII characters: "äöüß", the first three have "umlauts" (two dots over the top): A O and U and the last is a double-S ("scharfes S") which looks like the Greek letter beta (except in capitalised words where it should be written "SS"). These can be written in ASCII in several ways, the most common are ae, oe ue AE OE UE ss or sz and the TeX versions "a "o "u "A "O "U "s. See also ABEND, blinkenlights, DAU, DIN, gedanken, GMD, kluge. Usenet newsgroup: news:soc.culture.german. ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/usenet/news-info/soc.answers/german-faq, ftp://alice.fmi.uni-passau.de/pub/dictionaries/german.dat.Z.