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In the German diaspora, aspects of German culture are passed on to younger generations through naming customs and through the use of spoken and written German. The Goethe Institute seeks to spread the knowledge of German culture worldwide. A total of 15.5 million people are currently learning German as a second language. [6]
Germanic culture is a term referring to the culture of Germanic peoples, and can be used to refer to a range of time periods and nationalities, but is most commonly used in either a historical or contemporary context to denote groups that derive from the Proto-Germanic language, which is generally thought to have emerged as a distinct language after 500 BC.
Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch originating from the Afrikaners of South Africa, with over 7.1 million native speakers; [6] Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it [7 ...
Shared lexical innovations between Celtic and Germanic languages, concentrated in certain semantic domains such as religion and warfare, indicate intensive contacts between the Germani and Celtic peoples, usually identified with the archaeological La Tène culture, found in southern Germany and the modern Czech Republic. [112]
The German language is the key marker of German ethnic identity. [7] [17] German and Low German are West Germanic languages closely related to Dutch, Frisian languages (in particular North Frisian and Saterland Frisian), Luxembourgish, and English. [7] Modern Standard German is based on High German and Central German, and is the first or second ...
While these may cover minority rights, support of certain language facilities (schools, media, etc.), and the promotion of cultural protection/heritage, they do not encompass the establishment of German as an "official" language, i.e., being required in public offices or administrative texts. These countries include:
However, the classical "Germani" near the Rhine, to whom the term was originally applied by Caesar, may not have even spoken Germanic languages, let alone a language recognizably ancestral to modern Dutch. [5] The close relatives of Dutch, Low German, English and Frisian, are sometimes designated as Ingvaeonic, or alternatively, "North Sea Germanic
A visible sign of the geographical extension of the German language is the German-language media outside the German-speaking countries. German is the second most commonly used scientific language [ 71 ] [ better source needed ] as well as the third most widely used language on websites after English and Russian.