Language code: de

Technical information about ISO 639 language code de

The table below provides technical details for the German language, designated by the de code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

de

Name

Official

German

Native

Deutsch

Family
Germanic
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
Low GermanCentral GermanUpper German
Related languages
DutchAfrikaansYiddishLuxembourgishEnglish
Key facts
Uses the unique letter 'ß' alongside the umlauted vowels 'ä', 'ö', and 'ü'Allows virtually unlimited noun compounding, leading to very long wordsRetains four grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive)All nouns are capitalized regardless of their position in a sentenceHas contributed a large body of vocabulary to scientific, philosophical, and musical discourse worldwide.
Sample phrase

Hallo, wie geht es dir?

Character encodings

ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, Windows 1252, CP 437, CP 850, MacRoman, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

German belongs to the Indo-European language family, more precisely to the Germanic subgroup. It is officially used in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Additionally, it is recognized as a minority language in several countries, including Denmark and Poland. It is written using the Latin script (German alphabet). It is estimated that there are more than 95 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

*The graph shows a rough estimate of German speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

de-AT German (Austria)

de-BE German (Belgium)

de-CH German (Switzerland)

de-DE German (Germany)

de-IT German (Italy)

de-LI German (Liechtenstein)

de-LU German (Luxembourg)

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