German
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Fact corner
- Language: German
- Alternate names: Deutsch, Tedesco
- SIL-code: Ethnologue:deu
- Language family: Indo-European, Germanic, West, High German, German, Middle German, East Middle German
- Number of speakers: 95,392,978
- Script: Latin script
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Introduction
The German language is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. German is closely related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. Around the world, German is spoken by ~100 million native speakers and also ~30 million non-native speakers, and Standard German is widely taught in schools and universities in Europe.
The verb
Standard German verbs inflect into:
- one of two conjugation classes, weak and strong (like English).
- three persons: 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
- two numbers: singular and plural
- three moods: Indicative, Subjunctive, Imperative
- two genera verbus: active and passive; the passive being composed and dividable into static and dynamic.
- two non-composed tenses (Present, Preterite) and four composed tenses (Perfect, Pluperfect, Future I, Future II)