Language is humanity’s most important means of communication. It serves to exchange information, but also fulfils epistemic (relating to the organisation of thought), cognitive and affective functions. ‘Language’ has three fundamental components of meaning:^[1] (a) language in itself, the human capacity for language as such (French: faculté du langage), (b) language as a specific language, i.e. the concrete manifestation of (a) within a particular linguistic community at a particular point in time (French: langue), and (c) the realisation of (b) in specific communicative events (French: parole).

Since when has humankind had language? Estimates suggest that human language(s) developed between 140,000 and 70,000 BC.^[2] It is not known how this process (glottogony) took place, or whether it occurred as a single event – the monogenesis of a single proto-language, the so-called Adamitic language – or as polygenesis in different places at different times. Since antiquity, language has been regarded as a key distinguishing feature of humans compared with all other living beings (homo animal loquens, ‘man is the speaking creature’).

Children’s ability to acquire the language(s) of their environment is innate. It develops in the course of each individual’s biological maturation and socialisation. This ontogenesis of language is studied within the fields of language acquisition research and research into children’s language.

The physical manifestation of language consists of (articulated) chains of speech sounds (and later also chains of written characters), which are arranged linearly in time (or on a written medium in two-dimensional space) and express elements from all levels of the language system. These levels are (a) the inventory of speech sounds of the language in question, which represents a specific selection from a universal inventory; (b) their semanticisation within the system of phonemes, sounds and the rules governing stress, intonation and prosody (pitch variation); (c) the chaining of sounds into syllables, word-formation elements and words, (d) the combination of the units from (c) into phrases, sentences and texts. To some extent, the level of meaning (word, sentence and text meanings) runs parallel to this. Added to this are rules and norms governing language use and linguistic behaviour. For the purpose of describing and analysing language(s), categories that can be generalised as far as possible—such as sound, syllable, word or sentence—are used.

The invention of writing can be dated to the late 4th millennium BC.^[3] The existence of written records marks the dividing line between prehistory and historical times. At the same time, it marks the beginning of the transmission of linguistic data that can serve as the basis for linguistic descriptions and analyses. Written records provide the material for research into the history of language. They enable the comparative reconstruction of ancient linguistic states—or aspects thereof—for which no data is available.

Today, around 5,000 languages are spoken across the globe. Only a few hundred of these are also written, and only a fraction of those are developed written languages. Alongside independent languages, there are varieties that are regarded as dialects, sociolects, special languages, etc., in relation to a particular language.

Linguistic diversity is, on the one hand, a heritage of humanity worth preserving, for every single language is a unique expression of the human spirit, a ‘thought of God’, as J. G. Herder (1744–1803), the much-quoted father of the ‘Spring of Nations’ in the 19th century, put it metaphorically. On the other hand, linguistic diversity can become a domestic and economic policy problem in the course of modernisation processes if it constitutes a barrier to communication. In such cases, one or more nationwide and, where necessary, additional regional linguae francae are essential to facilitate domestic communication. Such linguae francae are often the languages of former colonial or dominant trading powers. In Northern Europe, Middle Low German (Mnd.) served as such a lingua franca in the late Middle Ages, whilst in parts of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, High German fulfilled this role between the 18th and 20th centuries.

The German language has been continuously preserved since the 8th century in the forms of Southern Old High German (Ahd.), Northern Old Saxon (As.) and Old Low Franconian (on the Lower Rhine). Old High German (Ahd.) gave way to Middle High German (Mhd.) in the 11th century, whilst Old Saxon (As.) was superseded by Middle Low German (Mnd.) in the 12th century. Parts of Holstein, as well as Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Upper Saxony and what later became West and East Prussia, were (partly) Germanised from the 12th century onwards through conquests and subsequent settlement from the west (including the Netherlands). The Elbe and Baltic Slavic languages were almost entirely displaced in the process (with the exception of Sorbian in south-eastern Brandenburg and eastern Saxony). In the north, the Middle Low German of Lübeck and Magdeburg spread as far as the Baltic region; in the south, Middle High German dialects extended from Thuringia to southern East Prussia (High Prussian).

As a result of migration flowsfrom the German and Dutch-speaking regions, (Low) German dialects also spread into non-German-speaking areas of Central, South-Eastern and Northern Europe during the High and Late Middle Ages (‘Landesausbau’). In the 18th century, German-speaking farmers and craftsmen migrated as far as Russia, the Caucasus and, once again, south-eastern Europe, giving rise in many places to German-speaking enclaves, most of which were lost as a result of the Second World War. In the Middle Ages, this was a spoken form of German which – depending on the migrants’ regions of origin – developed into mixed dialects.

In the Baltic states, in the cities of Finland, Sweden and Denmark, as well as in Pomerania and Prussia, Middle High German dialects spread as a result of heavy immigration from Germany. dialects, on the basis of which Middle Low German had emerged since the 14th century as a lingua franca spanning linguistic regions; it was used throughout the Baltic and North Sea regions as the language of official business and chancellery (alongside Latin), as a language of trade and as a general lingua franca. The heyday ofthe ‘Hanseatic language’came to an end in the 16th century, but the spoken German in this region remained influenced by Low German (Baltic German, Lower Prussian, Central and East Pomeranian). Following the expulsion of the German population in 1945, these dialects died out.

Central German dialects in what was formerly a West Slavic-speaking region include Upper Saxon, South Markish, Silesian (now only in isolated pockets, such as Lower Silesian in the district of Görlitz) and (now extinct) High Prussian. German in Poland, in the north of Bohemia and Moravia, and in Transylvania was characterised by Central German influences.

In the south, Central Bavarian in its Austrian form was the main contact variety of German. The German settlement areas and linguistic enclaves in southern Bohemia and Moravia, in the County of Carniola (in present-day Slovenia), in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia and Slovakia were characterised by Middle Bavarian; the same applied to the settlement areas of the 18th-century ‘colonists’ who had been summoned by the Austrian government (‘Danube Swabians’, formerly: ‘Hungarian Germans’). The later‘Russian Germans’, recruited by Catherine II (1762–1796), spoke Central German dialects, Alemannic-Swabian and Bavarian, from which new mixed dialects emerged.

Their relationship with the respective contact languages varied. In Denmark, Sweden and Poland, the (mostly urban) German immigrants generally assimilated into the majority population. In the Baltic states, German remained the dominant language until around 1880, and had to be learnt by Estonians and Latvians who wished to climb the social ladder; thereafter, Russian was established as the official language. In the Duchy of Prussia, Lithuanians and Poles seeking social advancement assimilated into the German majority, whilst in Royal Prussia the major cities retained German majorities. Following the partitions of Poland–Lithuania, the pressure to Germanise in the ‘Grand Duchy of Posen’increased steadily; this led to widespread bilingualism. In the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, German generally managed to hold its ground in many regions until 1918 or 1945 respectively; the shift from the respective majority language to German was often both a means of and an expression of social advancement.

The spread of the (Lutheran) Reformation was accompanied by the spread of High German as a written language, and later also as the language of administration, the courts, sermons and schools in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In the German settlement areas around the Baltic Sea and in the historic Kingdom of Poland–Lithuania, in Transylvania and the towns of the Spiš region, High German prevailed in such sophisticated functions by the end of the 16th century (in place of Latin). In Bohemia, Hungary and throughout the Balkans, this process took place in the late 18th century, following the educational reforms of Maria Theresa (1740–1780) and Joseph II (1765–1790) had led to the norms of the High German standard, as defined by Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), being (gradually) adopted and taught in schools.

German was the language of official business and chancellery (competing with Latin until the 18th century) in Estland and Livonia, in the Duchy of Prussia (where it supplanted the Prussian language), and in the 16th century also in Royal Prussia (where it retained this function in the cities of Danzig, Thorn and Elbing ), in the Kingdom of Bohemia, in Carniola, in Upper Hungary (present-day Slovakia), in the Principality of Transylvania, and in the 19th century (to a limited extent) in Galicia and in Bukovina. Joseph II’s attempt to establish German as the official and chancery language in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy also failed swiftly.

German served as the (privileged) regional language and language of instruction, or as the compulsory first foreign language, in those areas where German minorities were politically and economically dominant, namely in Estonia, Livonia and Courland, in the Cisleithanian provinces of the Danube Monarchy, and amongst the Transylvanian Saxons. In these areas, it was also used as a literary language. In the 19th century, assimilated, middle-class Jews in Austria-Hungary, but also in Russia, adopted German as the language of education and literature. Notable figures in German-language literature from Central and Eastern Europe include, amongst others, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–1792), Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904), Eduard von Keyserling (1855–1918), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Rose Ausländer (1901–1988), Elias Canetti (1905–1994), Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) and Herta Müller (born 1953).

see "Language policy"

• Konrad Ehlich, Jakob Ossner, Harro Stammerjohann (eds.): Standard Languages in Europe. Origins, Status, Future. Freiburg im Breisgau 2001.
• Helmut Glück: German as a Foreign Language in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Period. Berlin, New York 2002.
• Helmut Glück: German as a Foreign Language in the Age of the Enlightenment, Classicism and Romanticism. An Outline of the History of the German Language in Europe. Wiesbaden 2013 (Foreign Languages in History and the Present 12).
• Helmut Glück, Michael Rödel (eds.): Metzler Encyclopaedia of Language. 5th ed. Stuttgart 2016.
• Peter von Polenz: A History of the German Language from the Late Middle Ages to the Present Day. 3 vols. Berlin, New York 1991–1999.
• Franz Stark: German in Europe. A History of its Status and Influence. Sankt Augustin 2002 (Languages and Language Learning 309).
• Harald Weinrich: Language, that is, Languages. Tübingen 2001 (Forum for Specialised Language Research 50).

[1] This distinction was first made by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a Swiss linguist and the founder of synchronic linguistics. The original French terms are given in brackets below.

[2] Horst M. Müller: Language and Evolution. Foundations of Evolution and Approaches to an Evolutionary Theory of Linguistics. Berlin 1990; Jean-Louis Dessalles, Aux origines du langage [On the Origins of Language]. Paris 2000. See also the volumes in the series *Studies in the Evolution of Language*, edited by Kathleen R. Gibson and Maggie Tallerman, published by Oxford University Press (2001 onwards).

[3] Hartmut Günther, Otto Ludwig (eds.): Schrift und Schriftlichkeit. Writing and Its Use. An International Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research. 2 half-volumes, Berlin, New York 1944, 1996 (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Studies, Vol. 10, 1/2), here Vol. 1, Chapter III: History of Writing, pp. 122–423.