Wanna know a secret? If you’re a native English speaker, then you can already speak some German! There are actually lots of German words used in English. Let’s take a look.
We are family.
Buckle up kids, time for a history lesson.
German and English both come from the same family – the Germanic language family. It evolved from the Proto-Germanic language, believed to have been spoken between ca. 500 BCE until ca. 5th Century CE. The language was then split into three further branches – Northern, Eastern and Western Germanic languages.
Eastern Germanic languages started to die out in the 4th century and the last known of these languages – Crimean Gothic – became extinct in the 18th century.
Northern Germanic languages are those we know today as the Nordic/Scandanavian languages. They are: Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish and Faroese.
Western Germanic languages are German, English, Dutch, Frisian, Pennsylvanian Dutch, Luxembourgish, Yiddish and Afrikaans.
How many people speak Germanic languages?
I hear you ask. Well, I did some extensive research (I Googled it) and found the following numbers:
There are approximately 20.5 million native speakers of Northern Germanic languages:
Broken down per language, that looks like:
- Swedish: 9 million
- Norwegian: 5.3 million (Bokmal)
- Icelandic: 300,000
- Danish: 6 million
- Faroese: 66,000
Western Germanic languages win the count with approx. 513 million native speakers:
Again, if we break these down per language, the numbers look like this:
- 100 million German Speakers (note:this number varies widely)
- 23 million Dutch Speakers
- 500,000 Frisian Speakers
- 400,000 Pennsylvania Dutch
- 600,000 Luxembourgish
- 1.5 million Yiddish
- 7 million Afrikaans
- 380 million English
This total is just native speakers and does not take into account those who speak these languages as second, third, fourth or hundredth languages.
When you take into account how closely related these languages are to each other, along with the number of speakers scattered around the globe, it’s easy to understand why there would be some German words used in English.
Side note: as someone who has also recently started learning Norwegian, I can confirm that there are several words that are the same/similar between both Norwegian/German and Norwegian/English.
Similarities between German and English
Aside from them both coming from the Germanic language family, let’s begin with their similar use of the Latin alphabet. Sure, German likes to be difficult and has the additional umlauted letters, but essentially those same 26 letters you learned in Nursery school are the ones you’ll use in German.
Both German and English use the Arabic numbering system as well, although you could argue that this is clutching at straws because every language in the Western world uses this numbering system. It is also widely used in Chinese, Japanese and Russian. In fact, the computer programme language is probably the only language that does not use it.
Let’s make it even simpler – basically, a lot of words look or sound similar in both languages.
For Example:
- Creative – Kreativ
- Water – Wasser
- Better – Besser
- House – Haus
- Old – Alt
- Summer – Sommer
I could go on but you get the idea.
10 German words you already know
Angst
It means the same in both languages – anxiety, fear, dread, existential crises. Y’know. All the stuff we’re all experiencing right now.
Wanderlust
Wandern = to hike, to roam, to ramble
Lust = desire, joy, delight, pleasure
Again, this has the same meaning in both German and English – the strong desire to travel the world. But please, keep that desire internalised for now. There’s a global pandemic. Sheesh.
Kaputt
It’s the informal way of saying something’s not working (including yourself – ich bin kaputt is a phrase used to say you’re exhausted. I use it a lot.)
Rucksack
Der Rücken = the back/spine
Sack = …do I really have to translate that for you?
Nice. Simple. To the point.
Kindergarten
This one is less common in British English but widely used in North America.
However, I do believe there are some differences between the German and English versions of a Kindergarten.