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German linguistic data
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Common questions about German
What linguistic data does this German page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with German's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the German data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
What is V2 word order?
In a main clause, the finite verb has to occupy the second 'position' regardless of what's first. Ich gehe heute ins Kino, Heute gehe ich ins Kino, Ins Kino gehe ich heute — all grammatical, all V2. Subordinate clauses are different: the verb moves to the end (..., weil ich heute ins Kino gehe). Modern English lost this pattern; modern German keeps it strictly.
How do separable verbs work?
Many German verbs consist of a particle prefix plus a base verb. In infinitive and participle, they're written as one word (aufstehen, aufgestanden). In a finite main clause, the particle detaches and moves to the end: Ich stehe um sieben auf ('I get up at seven'). The base verb takes V2 position; the particle waits at the end.
Why does German have high similarity with Dutch?
Both are West Germanic, share V2 word order, separable verbs, three-gender systems (Dutch has reduced to two in standard, but the dialects retain three), and a substantial cognate vocabulary. Dutch lost most of the case system German keeps. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for German
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Duden (2016). Die Grammatik, 9th ed. Berlin: Dudenverlag.
- Eisenberg, Peter (2020). Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik (Band 1 & 2), 5th ed. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.
- Hammer, Alfred E. / Durrell, Martin (2017). Hammer's German Grammar and Usage, 6th ed. London: Routledge.
- Fox, Anthony (2005). The Structure of German, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press.
- Hall, T. Alan (2000). Phonologie: Eine Einführung. Berlin: de Gruyter.