Station
identification: "Schweizer Radio", meaning Swiss
Radio Spoken in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
German belongs to the Netherlandic-German group within the Western branch of the Germanic languages. It comprises two main groups of dialects: High German (including standard literary German) and Low German. These are geographically spread from Switzerland to the North Sea and vary continuously between those geographical limits. A local dialect can be understood by speakers of nearby dialects but not necessarily by speakers of distant dialects.
One characteristic of German (and all the Germanic languages) is that the first syllable of each word is stressed except in combinationsof verbs where the root syllable is stressed.
Other characteristic of German include: glottal stops before every initial stressed vowel in simple words or independent parts of a word; the use of rounded lips to pronounce the vowels u, o, ü, and ö; tense long vowels and the relaxed short vowels; the articulation of r from the lips and from the throat; the voicing of the single sbefore and between vowels, and the un-voicing of final b, d , g to p, t, k, sounds; the use of pf and ts; and the pronunciation of w as v and of v as f. Vowels are nasalized only in French borrowings.
German is an inflected language and word order is strict. German makes extensive use of compounds of two or more independent words and of prefixes and suffixes.
Swiss German has a jaunty musical intonation similar to Swedish except that the language sounds very much like a North Germanic language.
Station
identification: "Schweizer Radio", meaning Swiss
Radio
| Name | Where spoken | Language Family | How many (000s) |
| German | E & W Germany, Austria, Switzerland, other parts of E European, USA, S Africa, Latin America | Indo-European (Germanic) | 95-100m |
Table source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, David Ctystal, Cambridge University Press
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