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A brief history of the German language
High German dialects (as opposed to Low German dialects) during the Middle Age went through the second Germanic sound shift and are considered part of the modern German language.The different regional dialects have developed for a number of reasons: physical isolation caused by high mountains and deep forests, the presence of rivers which served as routes for communication (the Völkerwanderung), colonization were all factors which gave rise to the different dialects spoken across the Holy Roman Empire. These dialects were quite unlike one with the other and sometimes they were mutually unintelligible.
During a large period-several hundred years-Germany was divided into many different states and this contributed to creating linguistic diversity. The only attempt to unify and standardize the language was carried out by writers, who tried to write in a way that could be understood by the greatest number of people.
The Bible's translation by Martin Luther King (the New Testament in 1521 and the Old Testament in 1534) was based on the most widely understood language at this time. At the beginning, the copies of the Bible were accompanied by a list for each region. the list contained the translation into the regional dialect those words who were unknown in the area. At the beginning, the Church rejected Luther's translation and wrote its own version (Gemeines Deutsch). Only in the middle of the 18th century it was created a widely accepted standard. By this time, the period of Early New High German was over.
In the Habsburg Empire, a territory which extended in Central and Eastern Europe, German was used in commerce and by the government. Until the mid 19th century, German was the language of townspeople across the whole empire. It indicate the status of a person-i.e. if he was an urbanite, a merchant-but not where he came from. With the incorporation in the Habsburg Empire, some cities as Prague or Budapest were little by little "germanized". Those cities who were settled during the Habsburg period, such as Bratislava (Pressburg in German) were German at that time. Others cities, as Milan (Mailand in German) always were "non-German".
Standard German existed only in its written form until about the 19th century. In this period, the inhabitants of northern Germany spoke dialects which were completely different from Standard language. Indeed, they learnt German as a foreign language and made efforts in trying to imitate standard pronunciation. Pronunciation guides identified the pronunciation of Northern German as the standard one. However, any region virtually has a different pronunciation.
Hochdeutsch (or Standard German) is the language of the media and that of written works. It is understood everywhere, with the exception of children in pre-school age in those areas where the only spoken form is the dialect.
The most exhaustive guide to the words of German language was published between 1852 and 1960, when the Grimm Brothers started writing the 16 parts which formed the first dictionary. The Duden Handbook of 1860 included the first rules concerning orthography and grammar, which in 1901 were declared the standard definition of the German language. In 1996, the governmental representatives of all German-speaking countries promulgated the German spelling reform. What followed was a series of official revisions of the grammar rules, which ended in 1998. Since the reform, the spelling has gone through a transitional period of eight years. The reformed spelling was thought in schools, while in the media the new form of spelling coexisted with the traditional one.
Many German Universities were set up during the 1870s. This caused German to successfully substitute Latin as the language of education in Europe and North America. What is more, publications in the area of scientific research were mainly in German and some Universities, as Stanford University, replaced their Greek and Latin mottos with German ones.