German (Deutsch [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ( listen)) is a West Germanic language related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90–100 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union.

Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. A number of words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer from French and English.

German is written using the Latin alphabet. In addition to the 26 standard letters, German has three vowels with umlauts (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, and Ü/ü) and the letter ß.