German (
Deutsch ˈdɔʏtʃ) is a
West Germanic language related to and classified alongside
English and
Dutch. With an estimated 95–100 million native speakers, German is one of the world's
major languages and is the most widely-spoken
first language in the
European Union.
Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. A number of words are derived from
Latin and Greek, and fewer from French and English.
German 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.