language of Germany, Austria and Liechtenstein, one of the official languages of Switzerland, Luxembourg and

The Germany national football team in 2012. Football is the most popular sport in Germany.
Twenty-seven million Germans are members of a sports club and an additional twelve million pursue sports individually.[228] Association football is the most popular sport. With more than 6.3 million official members, the German Football Association (Deutscher Fußball-Bund) is the largest sports organisation of its kind worldwide.[228] The Bundesliga, the top league of German football, is the most popular sports league in Germany and attracts the second highest average attendance of any professional sports league in the world.
The German national football team won the FIFA World Cup in 1954, 1974 and 1990 and the UEFA European Football Championship in 1972, 1980 and 1996. Germany hosted the FIFA World Cup in 1974 and 2006 and the UEFA European Football Championship in 1988. Among the most well-known footballers are Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller, Jürgen Klinsmann, Lothar Matthäus, and Oliver Kahn.
Other popular spectator sports include wintersports, boxing, handball, volleyball, basketball, ice hockey, tennis, horse riding and golf. Water sports like sailing, rowing, swimming, wind- and kitesurfing, wakeboarding, underwater diving, fishing, powerboating and yachting are popular in Germany as well, especially with large annual events such as Kiel Week or Hanse Sail Rostock.[228]
Germany is one of the leading motor sports countries in the world. Constructors like BMW and Mercedes are prominent manufacturers in motor sport. Additionally, Porsche has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, an annual endurance race held in France, 16 times, and Audi has won it 11 times. The Formula One driver Michael Schumacher has set many motor sport records during his career, having won more Formula One World Drivers' Championships and more Formula One races than any other driver; he is one of the highest paid sportsmen in history.[229] Sebastian Vettel has won the championships from 2010 until 2013 and thus is among the most successful F1 drivers of all times.
Historically, German sportsmen have been successful contenders in the Olympic Games, ranking third in an all-time Olympic Games medal count, combining East and West German medals. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, Germany finished fifth in the medal count,[230] while in the 2006 Winter Olympics they finished first.[231] Germany has hosted the Summer Olympic Games twice, in Berlin in 1936 and in Munich in 1972. The Winter Olympic Games took place in Germany once in 1936 in the twin towns of Garmisch and Partenkirchen.
German (Deutsch ['d??t?] ( listen)) is spoken natively by approximately 89 million people, making it one of Europe's most spoken languages. It is also the first most widely spoken as native language in Europe but the least spoken outside main native areas like Germany and Austria where English and French dominate the European Union.
German is a West Germanic language and derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.[19] A number of words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer from French and English. Widely spoken languages which are most similar to German include Luxembourgish, Yiddish, Dutch, the Frisian languages, the Scandinavian languages and English.
It is written using the Latin alphabet. In addition to the 26 standard letters, German has three vowels with umlauts (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, and Ü/ü) and the letter ß (a special kind of "s", called "Eszett" or "scharfes Es"; it originates from the junction of archaic forms of the letters s and z, which were represented as ? and ?, respectively, that is, ? + ? = ?? = ß).
German is a pluricentric language, with multiple countries having their own standardised variants (e.g. Austrian German, Swiss Standard German). There is also one variant referred to as Standard German.
German is the only official language of Germany, Austria and Liechtenstein, one of the official languages of Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium and a recognised minority language in many countries such as Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, Namibia and Poland.
The history of the language begins with the High German consonant shift during the migration period, separating Old High German dialects from Old Saxon. The earliest evidence of Old High German is from scattered Elder Futhark inscriptions, especially in Alemannic, from the 6th century AD; the earliest glosses (Abrogans) date to the 8th; and the oldest coherent texts (the Hildebrandslied, the Muspilli and the Merseburg Incantations) to the 9th century. Old Saxon at this time belongs to the North Sea Germanic cultural sphere, and Low Saxon was to fall under German rather than Anglo-Frisian influence during the Holy Roman Empire.
As Germany was divided into many different states, the only force working for a unification or standardization of German for several hundred years was the general wish of writers to be understood by as many readers as possible.
Modern German[edit]
Germany[edit]
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