German is the most widely spoken native language in the European Union and an official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Belgium and Luxembourg. Today, more than 100 million native speakers use the German language in everyday life, making it one of the world’s major Germanic languages.

But the German language didn’t always look or sound the way it does today. Over thousands of years, it evolved from Proto-Germanic into Old High German and eventually into the standardized language learners study today. Along the way, its grammar , vocabulary , alphabet and pronunciation all changed dramatically.

Let’s take a journey through the history of the German language, from its first proto-speakers 3,000 years ago to its youngest letter.

Proto-Germanic: The Beginning Of The German Language

Before we can even begin to talk about German, we have to travel back to sometime between 1000 and 450 BCE, to when the First Germanic Sound Shift — or change in pronunciation — took place…