German

German is the West Germanic dialect continuum of central Europe, split in the Early Middle Ages by the High German consonant shift: the southern dialects that underwent it became High German, while the Low German of the northern plains and Dutch at the Low Franconian western edge did not. Old High German first appears in runic inscriptions of the 500s, then in the Abrogans glossary of the 700s and the Hildebrandslied of the 800s, and Middle High German of about 1050 to 1350 carried courtly epic and Minnesang. To the north Old Saxon grew into Middle Low German, the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League from about 1100 to 1500 around the usage of Lübeck; when the league faded in the 1600s, Low German sank to a local dialect. The High German of medieval Jewish communities meanwhile fused with Hebrew and Aramaic into Yiddish, attested from the 1100s and written in the Hebrew alphabet.

In 1337 no standard German yet existed. Martin Luther's Bible translation, the New Testament of 1522 and the complete Bible of 1534, was based on the Meissen German of Saxony, then the most widely understood form of the language, and carried a common written form across the Protestant lands; a broadly accepted standard emerged only by the mid-1700s, and until about 1800 it remained almost solely a written language that northerners learned like a foreign tongue. In the Habsburg Empire German was the language of towns, trade and government from Prague to Budapest, while Alemannic, Bavarian, Saxon and Low German dialects filled everyday speech.