German plays an important role in the socio-economic life of Europe and the world. It is taught in many countries around the world as well as English and French.
1. The word deutsch comes from the old German diutisc, which means “to speak the language of the people” or “the people”.
2. The German inventor Johannes Gutenberg made a huge breakthrough in printing, which influenced the entire world. He invented the “European way of printing” using moving letters. And of course the first books he published were in German.
3. Today, almost every 10 books in the world are published in German.
4. Before the German language starts to use Latin letters for writing, they were using runes, which became obsolete only after underwent Christianisation.
5. According to «Ethnologue: Languages of the World» – the world’s most famous international language guide in 2016, more than 75 million people around the world consider German as their native language and still have about the same level a second language. German is in thirteenth place among all languages of the world and has an official status not only in Germany but also in Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and Belgium.
6. The majority of German-speaking minorities live in Brazil with over 1,900,000 people.
7. In Argentina, Buenos Aires residents speak Belgranodeutsch, a mixture of German and Spanish. The name “Belgranodeutsch” was given to the Belgrano region, where the German community lived in the XX century.
8. One of the funniest idioms in German is “Das ist nicht dein Bier”, which literally translates as “It’s not your beer” and used by the Germans in the sense of “It’s not your business”.
9. If you write down the numbers in German, sometimes it can be a very long word. Germans write in one word the numbers that are up to a million. For example, if you write down the number 999999 in German, then you get a word with 57 letters: neunhundertneunundneunzigtausendneunhundertneunundneunzig.
10. The word “gift” in English and German have completely different meanings. In German, it means “poison.” Therefore, the Germans buy “gifts” mainly for rats and cockroaches, not for their loved ones and relatives.
