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Early New High German

Main article: Early New High German

Modern German begins with the Early New High German (ENHG) period, which the influential German philologist Wilhelm Scherer dates 1350-1650, terminating with the end of the Thirty Years' War. This period saw the further displacement of Latin by German as the primary language of courtly proceedings and, increasingly, of literature in the German states. While these states were still under the control of the Holy Roman Empire and far from any form of unification, the desire for a cohesive written language that would be understandable across the many German-speaking principalities and kingdoms was stronger than ever. As a spoken language German remained highly fractured through this period with a vast number of often mutually-incomprehensible regional dialects being spoken throughout the German states. However, the invention of the printing press c.1440 and the publication of Luther's vernacular translation of the Bible in 1534 had an immense effect on standardizing German as a supra-dialectal written language.

The ENHG period saw the rise of several important cross-regional forms of chancery German, one being gemeine tiutsch, used in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, and the other being Meißner Deutsch, used in the Electorate of Saxony in the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg. Alongside these courtly written standards, the invention of the printing press led to the development of many printers' languages (Druckersprachen) aimed at making printed material readable and understandable across as many diverse dialects of German as possible. The greater ease of production and increased availability of written texts brought about increased standardization in the written form of the German language. The widespread popularity of the Bible translated into German by Martin Luther helped establish modern German.

One of the central events in the development of ENHG was the publication of Luther's translation of the Bible into German (the New Testament in 1522 and the Old Testament, published in parts and completed in 1534). Luther based his translation primarily on the Meißner Deutsch of Saxony,spendinggmuch time among the population of Saxony researching the dialect so make the work as natural and accessible to German speakers as possible. Copies of Luther's Bible featured an extensive list of glosses for each region that translated words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Concerning his translation method Luther says the following:

With Luther's rendering of the Bible in the vernacular German asserted itself against the dominance of Latin as a legitimate language for courtly, literary, and now ecclesiastical subject-matter. Further, his Bible was ubiquitous in the German states with nearly every household possessing a copy. Nevertheless, even with the influence of Luther's Bible as an unofficial written standard, it was not until the middle of the 18th century after the ENHG period that a widely accepted standard for written German appeared.