German is spoken natively by approximately 100 million people,
making it one of the world's major languages. It is also the most widely spoken first language in the European Union.
With the inclusion of the second-language speakers, the number of German speakers is about 200 million.
German is a West Germanic language and derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-Europeanlanguage family.
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.