High School German/Introduction

Introduction
Welcome to High School German. This course is designed for High School students with no prior language learning experience. The language of the course is German, and learners will build their understanding of German over a four year curriculum.

German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. Today, German is the most spoken native language in the European Union. German is the majority language in the DACH countries of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. As of 2012 there were 90,000,000 native speakers of German worldwide

German is also the majority spoken language in South Tyrol in Italy, and the German-speaking Community of Belgium. It is one of the three official languages of Luxembourg and a co-official language in the Opole Voivodeship in Poland.

The German language is most similar to other languages within the West Germanic language branch, including Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Frisian, Low German/Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, and Yiddish.

It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, although they belong to the North Germanic group.

German is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English.

In this course, learners will be taught Standard German otherwise known as Hochdeutsch.


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