German

It ranks the 10th most widely spoken language in the world, with around 100m native speakers and a further 80m non-native speakers. It is most closely related to Dutch and English.

Six European countries have German as an official language: Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg.

When translating from English into German, the number of words can decrease by as much as 20% due to the use of compound nouns; however the amount of space required for the text can increase by the same amount, because the words tend to be longer than their English equivalents.

Among the many English words with German origins are angst, poltergeist, blitz, delicatessen, rucksack, abseil and kindergarten.

In 1999 the longest German word (non-sceintific) still in use was deemed to be:.

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz .

with 63 letters, meaning "Law relating to delegation of duties for supervision of cattle marking and beef labelling".

German uses the Latin alphabet and has the same 26 letters as English, and in addition there are three vowels which take an umlaut (ä, ö, ü) and the letter ß (‘eszett’ or ‘sharp s’) which is only used in lower-case (when capitalised, ß becomes SS).

In the German version of Scrabble there are 102 letters, and the points value of the letter “Z” is 3 and the letter “Y” is 10.