Standard German

Austria
Belgium
Germany
South Tyrol (Italy)
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Switzerland

No official regulation

Standard German (German: Standarddeutsch, Hochdeutsch, or Schriftdeutsch) is the standardized variety of the German language used in formal contexts, and for communication between different dialect areas. It is a pluricentric Dachsprache with three codified (or "standardized") specific regional variants: German Standard German, Austrian Standard German and Swiss Standard German.

Regarding the spelling and punctuation, a recommended standard is published by the Council for German Orthography which represents the governments of all majority and minority German-speaking countries and dependencies. Adherence is obligatory not for everyday use but for government institutions including schools. For pronunciation, there is no official standards body but there is a long-standing de facto standard pronunciation ("Bühnendeutsch"), most commonly used in formal speech and teaching materials; it is similar to the formal German spoken in and around Hanover. Adherence to those standards by private individuals and companies, including the print and audio-visual media, is voluntary but widespread.

Standard German originated not as a traditional dialect of a specific region, but as a written language, developed over a process of several hundred years, in which writers tried to write in a way that was understood in the largest area. Until about 1800, Standard German was almost entirely a written language. In this time, people in Northern Germany, who mainly spoke Low Saxon languages very different from Standard German, learned it as a foreign language. However, later the Northern pronunciation (of Standard German) was considered standard and spread southward; in some regions (such as around Hanover) the local dialect has completely died out with the exception of small communities of Low German speakers. It is thus the spread of Standard German as a language taught at school that defines the German Sprachraum, i.e. a political decision rather than a direct consequence of dialect geography, allowing areas with dialects of very limited mutual comprehensibility to participate in the same cultural sphere. Currently, local dialects are used mainly in informal situations or at home and also in dialect literature, and more recently a resurgence of German dialects has appeared in mass media.