History of German - 19th Century

19th Century

German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-19th century it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire. It indicated that the speaker was a merchant, an urbanite, not his nationality. Some cities, such as Prague (German: Prag) and Budapest (Buda, German: Ofen), were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain. Others, such as Bratislava (German: Pressburg), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. A few cities such as Milan (German: Mailand) remained primarily non-German. However, most cities were primarily German during this time, such as Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, Zagreb (German: Agram), and Ljubljana (German: Laibach), though they were surrounded by territory where other languages were spoken.

Until about 1800, standard German was almost solely a written language. At this time, people in urban northern Germany, who spoke dialects very different from Standard German, learnt it almost as a foreign language and tried to pronounce it as close to the spelling as possible. Prescriptive pronunciation guides of that time considered northern German pronunciation to be the standard. However, the actual pronunciation of standard German varied from region to region.

Media and written works are almost all produced in standard German (often called Hochdeutsch in German), which is understood in all German-speaking areas (except by pre-school children in areas where only dialect is spoken, for example Switzerland — but in this age of TV, even they now usually learn to understand Standard German before school age).

The first dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, which was issued in 16 parts between 1852 and 1860, remains the most comprehensive guide to the lexicon of the German language.