German (Deutsch) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers. It's spoken in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein. Speaker communities exist also in Italy, Poland and Alsace.

Many of the founding documents of European culture have been written in the German language: Literature (Goethe, Schiller, Thomas Mann, Kafka), Classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart), Art (Kollwitz, Dürer, Klee, Kaninsky), Psychology (Freud, Jung), Philosophy (Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno), Science (Einstein, Kepler, Röntgen, Planck, Virchow), Reading or hearing them in the original language is the only way of appreciating their full power. Germany itself is the world's third biggest producer of books: 60,000 new German-language books are published every year. Every tenth book published in the world is written in German.

Most of the world's scientists have studied in German-speaking nations. German is the second most commonly used language in which to write a work of scientific research - especially engineering, chemistry and physics. This is why more than 40% of American scientists recommend that their students should learn German. In Hungary and Poland the figure is even higher, at over 70%. It is widely taught in schools, universities, and Goethe Institutes worldwide. With ever more firms learning German is becoming an ever smarter career move. And with such German-based firms as Daimler-Chrysler, BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, BMW, Siemens and Volkswagen so firmly rooted on the international scene, learning German appears to be twice as sensible a career move! At the moment, Germany is crying out for qualified software designers in particular, and German is the second most used language on the Internet.

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