title: Number

text: The search for roots of quintic and higher degree equations was an important development, the Abel–Ruffini theorem (Ruffini 1799, Abel 1824) showed that they could not be solved by radicals (formulas involving only arithmetical operations and roots). Hence it was necessary to consider the wider set of algebraic numbers (all solutions to polynomial equations). Galois (1832) linked polynomial equations to group theory giving rise to the field of Galois theory.


title: Number

text: Continued fractions, closely related to irrational numbers (and due to Cataldi, 1613), received attention at the hands of Euler, and at the opening of the 19th century were brought into prominence through the writings of Joseph Louis Lagrange. Other noteworthy contributions have been made by Druckenmüller (1837), Kunze (1857), Lemke (1870), and Günther (1872). Ramus first connected the subject with determinants, resulting, with the subsequent contributions of Heine, Möbius, and Günther, in the theory of .


title: Number

text: The existence of transcendental numbers was first established by Liouville (1844, 1851). Hermite proved in 1873 that "e" is transcendental and Lindemann proved in 1882 that π is transcendental. Finally, Cantor showed that the set of all real numbers is uncountably infinite but the set of all algebraic numbers is countably infinite, so there is an uncountably infinite number of transcendental numbers.


title: Number

text: The earliest known conception of mathematical infinity appears in the Yajur Veda, an ancient Indian script, which at one point states, "If you remove a part from infinity or add a part to infinity, still what remains is infinity." Infinity was a popular topic of philosophical study among the Jain mathematicians c. 400 BC. They distinguished between five types of infinity: infinite in one and two directions, infinite in area, infinite everywhere, and infinite perpetually. The symbol formula_3 is often used to represent an infinite quantity.


title: Number

text: Aristotle defined the traditional Western notion of mathematical infinity. He distinguished between actual infinity and potential infinity—the general consensus being that only the latter had true value. Galileo Galilei's "Two New Sciences" discussed the idea of one-to-one correspondences between infinite sets. But the next major advance in the theory was made by Georg Cantor; in 1895 he published a book about his new set theory, introducing, among other things, transfinite numbers and formulating the continuum hypothesis.


title: Number

text: In the 1960s, Abraham Robinson showed how infinitely large and infinitesimal numbers can be rigorously defined and used to develop the field of nonstandard analysis. The system of hyperreal numbers represents a rigorous method of treating the ideas about infinite and infinitesimal numbers that had been used casually by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers ever since the invention of infinitesimal calculus by Newton and Leibniz.


title: Number

text: A modern geometrical version of infinity is given by projective geometry, which introduces "ideal points at infinity", one for each spatial direction. Each family of parallel lines in a given direction is postulated to converge to the corresponding ideal point. This is closely related to the idea of vanishing points in perspective drawing.


title: Number

text: The earliest fleeting reference to square roots of negative numbers occurred in the work of the mathematician and inventor Heron of Alexandria in the , when he considered the volume of an impossible frustum of a pyramid. They became more prominent when in the 16th century closed formulas for the roots of third and fourth degree polynomials were discovered by Italian mathematicians such as Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia and Gerolamo Cardano. It was soon realized that these formulas, even if one was only interested in real solutions, sometimes required the manipulation of square roots of negative numbers.


title: Number

text: This was doubly unsettling since they did not even consider negative numbers to be on firm ground at the time. When René Descartes coined the term "imaginary" for these quantities in 1637, he intended it as derogatory. (See imaginary number for a discussion of the "reality" of complex numbers.) A further source of confusion was that the equation


title: Number

text: which is valid for positive real numbers "a" and "b", and was also used in complex number calculations with one of "a", "b" positive and the other negative. The incorrect use of this identity, and the related identity


title: Number

text: in the case when both "a" and "b" are negative even bedeviled Euler. This difficulty eventually led him to the convention of using the special symbol "i" in place of formula_7 to guard against this mistake.


title: Number

text: The 18th century saw the work of Abraham de Moivre and Leonhard Euler. De Moivre's formula (1730) states:


title: Number

text: The existence of complex numbers was not completely accepted until Caspar Wessel described the geometrical interpretation in 1799. Carl Friedrich Gauss rediscovered and popularized it several years later, and as a result the theory of complex numbers received a notable expansion. The idea of the graphic representation of complex numbers had appeared, however, as early as 1685, in Wallis's "De algebra tractatus".


title: Number

text: Also in 1799, Gauss provided the first generally accepted proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra, showing that every polynomial over the complex numbers has a full set of solutions in that realm. The general acceptance of the theory of complex numbers is due to the labors of Augustin Louis Cauchy and Niels Henrik Abel, and especially the latter, who was the first to boldly use complex numbers with a success that is well known.


title: Number

text: Gauss studied complex numbers of the form , where "a" and "b" are integral, or rational (and "i" is one of the two roots of ). His student, Gotthold Eisenstein, studied the type , where "ω" is a complex root of Other such classes (called cyclotomic fields) of complex numbers derive from the roots of unity for higher values of "k". This generalization is largely due to Ernst Kummer, who also invented ideal numbers, which were expressed as geometrical entities by Felix Klein in 1893.


title: Number

text: In 1850 Victor Alexandre Puiseux took the key step of distinguishing between poles and branch points, and introduced the concept of essential singular points. This eventually led to the concept of the extended complex plane.


title: Number

text: Prime numbers have been studied throughout recorded history. Euclid devoted one book of the "Elements" to the theory of primes; in it he proved the infinitude of the primes and the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, and presented the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers.


title: Number

text: In 240 BC, Eratosthenes used the Sieve of Eratosthenes to quickly isolate prime numbers. But most further development of the theory of primes in Europe dates to the Renaissance and later eras.


title: Number

text: In 1796, Adrien-Marie Legendre conjectured the prime number theorem, describing the asymptotic distribution of primes. Other results concerning the distribution of the primes include Euler's proof that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges, and the Goldbach conjecture, which claims that any sufficiently large even number is the sum of two primes. Yet another conjecture related to the distribution of prime numbers is the Riemann hypothesis, formulated by Bernhard Riemann in 1859. The prime number theorem was finally proved by Jacques Hadamard and Charles de la Vallée-Poussin in 1896. Goldbach and Riemann's conjectures remain unproven and unrefuted.


title: Number

text: Numbers can be classified into sets, called number sets or number systems, such as the natural numbers and the real numbers. The main number systems are as follows:


title: Number

text: Each of these number system is a subset of the next one. So, for example, a rational number is also a real number, and every real number is also a complex number. This can be expressed symbolically as


title: Number

text: The most familiar numbers are the natural numbers (sometimes called whole numbers or counting numbers): 1, 2, 3, and so on. Traditionally, the sequence of natural numbers started with 1 (0 was not even considered a number for the Ancient Greeks.) However, in the 19th century, set theorists and other mathematicians started including 0 (cardinality of the empty set, i.e. 0 elements, where 0 is thus the smallest cardinal number) in the set of natural numbers. Today, different mathematicians use the term to describe both sets, including 0 or not. The mathematical symbol for the set of all natural numbers is N, also written formula_11, and sometimes formula_12 or formula_13 when it is necessary to indicate whether the set should start with 0 or 1, respectively.


title: Number

text: In the base 10 numeral system, in almost universal use today for mathematical operations, the symbols for natural numbers are written using ten digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. The radix or base is the number of unique numerical digits, including zero, that a numeral system uses to represent numbers (for the decimal system, the radix is 10). In this base 10 system, the rightmost digit of a natural number has a place value of 1, and every other digit has a place value ten times that of the place value of the digit to its right.


title: Number

text: In set theory, which is capable of acting as an axiomatic foundation for modern mathematics, natural numbers can be represented by classes of equivalent sets. For instance, the number 3 can be represented as the class of all sets that have exactly three elements. Alternatively, in Peano Arithmetic, the number 3 is represented as sss0, where s is the "successor" function (i.e., 3 is the third successor of 0). Many different representations are possible; all that is needed to formally represent 3 is to inscribe a certain symbol or pattern of symbols three times.


title: Number

text: The negative of a positive integer is defined as a number that produces 0 when it is added to the corresponding positive integer. Negative numbers are usually written with a negative sign (a minus sign). As an example, the negative of 7 is written −7, and . When the set of negative numbers is combined with the set of natural numbers (including 0), the result is defined as the set of integers, Z also written formula_14. Here the letter Z comes . The set of integers forms a ring with the operations addition and multiplication.


title: Number

text: The natural numbers form a subset of the integers. As there is no common standard for the inclusion or not of zero in the natural numbers, the natural numbers without zero are commonly referred to as positive integers, and the natural numbers with zero are referred to as non-negative integers.


title: Number

text: A rational number is a number that can be expressed as a fraction with an integer numerator and a positive integer denominator. Negative denominators are allowed, but are commonly avoided, as every rational number is equal to a fraction with positive denominator. Fractions are written as two integers, the numerator and the denominator, with a dividing bar between them. The fraction represents "m" parts of a whole divided into "n" equal parts. Two different fractions may correspond to the same rational number; for example and are equal, that is:


title: Number

text: If the absolute value of "m" is greater than "n" (supposed to be positive), then the absolute value of the fraction is greater than 1. Fractions can be greater than, less than, or equal to 1 and can also be positive, negative, or 0. The set of all rational numbers includes the integers since every integer can be written as a fraction with denominator 1. For example −7 can be written . The symbol for the rational numbers is Q (for "quotient"), also written formula_18.


title: Number

text: The symbol for the real numbers is R, also written as formula_19 They include all the measuring numbers. Every real number corresponds to a point on the number line. The following paragraph will focus primarily on positive real numbers. The treatment of negative real numbers is according to the general rules of arithmetic and their denotation is simply prefixing the corresponding positive numeral by a minus sign, e.g. −123.456.


title: Number

text: Most real numbers can only be "approximated" by decimal numerals, in which a decimal point is placed to the right of the digit with place value 1. Each digit to the right of the decimal point has a place value one-tenth of the place value of the digit to its left. For example, 123.456 represents , or, in words, one hundred, two tens, three ones, four tenths, five hundredths, and six thousandths. A real number can be expressed by a finite number of decimal digits only if it is rational and its fractional part has a denominator whose prime factors are 2 or 5 or both, because these are the prime factors of 10, the base of the decimal system. Thus, for example, one half is 0.5, one fifth is 0.2, one-tenth is 0.1, and one fiftieth is 0.02. Representing other real numbers as decimals would require an infinite sequence of digits to the right of the decimal point. If this infinite sequence of digits follows a pattern, it can be written with an ellipsis or another notation that indicates the repeating pattern. Such a decimal is called a repeating decimal. Thus can be written as 0.333..., with an ellipsis to indicate that the pattern continues. Forever repeating 3s are also written as 0..


title: Number

text: It turns out that these repeating decimals (including the repetition of zeroes) denote exactly the rational numbers, i.e., all rational numbers are also real numbers, but it is not the case that every real number is rational. A real number that is not rational is called irrational. A famous irrational real number is the , the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter. When pi is written as


title: Number

text: as it sometimes is, the ellipsis does not mean that the decimals repeat (they do not), but rather that there is no end to them. It has been proved that is irrational. Another well-known number, proven to be an irrational real number, is


title: Number

text: the square root of 2, that is, the unique positive real number whose square is 2. Both these numbers have been approximated (by computer) to trillions of digits.


title: Number

text: Not only these prominent examples but almost all real numbers are irrational and therefore have no repeating patterns and hence no corresponding decimal numeral. They can only be approximated by decimal numerals, denoting rounded or truncated real numbers. Any rounded or truncated number is necessarily a rational number, of which there are only countably many. All measurements are, by their nature, approximations, and always have a margin of error. Thus 123.456 is considered an approximation of any real number greater or equal to and strictly less than (rounding to 3 decimals), or of any real number greater or equal to and strictly less than (truncation after the 3. decimal). Digits that suggest a greater accuracy than the measurement itself does, should be removed. The remaining digits are then called significant digits. For example, measurements with a ruler can seldom be made without a margin of error of at least 0.001 m. If the sides of a rectangle are measured as 1.23 m and 4.56 m, then multiplication gives an area for the rectangle between and . Since not even the second digit after the decimal place is preserved, the following digits are not "significant". Therefore, the result is usually rounded to 5.61.


title: Number

text: Just as the same fraction can be written in more than one way, the same real number may have more than one decimal representation. For example, 0.999..., 1.0, 1.00, 1.000, ..., all represent the natural number 1. A given real number has only the following decimal representations: an approximation to some finite number of decimal places, an approximation in which a pattern is established that continues for an unlimited number of decimal places or an exact value with only finitely many decimal places. In this last case, the last non-zero digit may be replaced by the digit one smaller followed by an unlimited number of 9's, or the last non-zero digit may be followed by an unlimited number of zeros. Thus the exact real number 3.74 can also be written 3.7399999999... and 3.74000000000... Similarly, a decimal numeral with an unlimited number of 0's can be rewritten by dropping the 0's to the right of the rightmost nonzero digit, and a decimal numeral with an unlimited number of 9's can be rewritten by increasing by one the rightmost digit less than 9, and changing all the 9's to the right of that digit to 0's. Finally, an unlimited sequence of 0's to the right of a decimal place can be dropped. For example, 6.849999999999... = 6.85 and 6.850000000000... = 6.85. Finally, if all of the digits in a numeral are 0, the number is 0, and if all of the digits in a numeral are an unending string of 9's, you can drop the nines to the right of the decimal place, and add one to the string of 9s to the left of the decimal place. For example, 99.999... = 100.


title: Number

text: The real numbers also have an important but highly technical property called the least upper bound property.


title: Number

text: It can be shown that any ordered field, which is also complete, is isomorphic to the real numbers. The real numbers are not, however, an algebraically closed field, because they do not include a solution (often called a square root of minus one) to the algebraic equation formula_22.


title: Number

text: Moving to a greater level of abstraction, the real numbers can be extended to the complex numbers. This set of numbers arose historically from trying to find closed formulas for the roots of cubic and quadratic polynomials. This led to expressions involving the square roots of negative numbers, and eventually to the definition of a new number: a square root of −1, denoted by "i", a symbol assigned by Leonhard Euler, and called the imaginary unit. The complex numbers consist of all numbers of the form


title: Number

text: where "a" and "b" are real numbers. Because of this, complex numbers correspond to points on the complex plane, a vector space of two real dimensions. In the expression , the real number "a" is called the real part and "b" is called the imaginary part. If the real part of a complex number is 0, then the number is called an imaginary number or is referred to as "purely imaginary"; if the imaginary part is 0, then the number is a real number. Thus the real numbers are a subset of the complex numbers. If the real and imaginary parts of a complex number are both integers, then the number is called a Gaussian integer. The symbol for the complex numbers is C or formula_24.


title: Number

text: The fundamental theorem of algebra asserts that the complex numbers form an algebraically closed field, meaning that every polynomial with complex coefficients has a root in the complex numbers. Like the reals, the complex numbers form a field, which is complete, but unlike the real numbers, it is not ordered. That is, there is no consistent meaning assignable to saying that "i" is greater than 1, nor is there any meaning in saying that "i" is less than 1. In technical terms, the complex numbers lack a total order that is compatible with field operations.


title: Number

text: An even number is an integer that is "evenly divisible" by two, that is divisible by two without remainder; an odd number is an integer that is not even. (The old-fashioned term "evenly divisible" is now almost always shortened to "divisible".) Any odd number "n" may be constructed by the formula for a suitable integer "k". Starting with the first non-negative odd numbers are {1, 3, 5, 7, ...}. Any even number "m" has the form where "k" is again an integer. Similarly, the first non-negative even numbers are {0, 2, 4, 6, ...}.


title: Number

text: A prime number, often shortened to just prime, is an integer greater than 1 that is not the product of two smaller positive integers. The first few prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. There is no such simple formula as for odd and even numbers to generate the prime numbers. The primes have been widely studied for more than 2000 years and have led to many questions, only some of which have been answered. The study of these questions belongs to number theory. Goldbach's conjecture is an example of a still unanswered question: "Is every even number the sum of two primes?"


title: Number

text: One answered question, as to whether every integer greater than one is a product of primes in only one way, except for a rearrangement of the primes, was confirmed; this proven claim is called the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. A proof appears in Euclid's Elements.


title: Number

text: Many subsets of the natural numbers have been the subject of specific studies and have been named, often after the first mathematician that has studied them. Example of such sets of integers are Fibonacci numbers and perfect numbers. For more examples, see Integer sequence.


title: Number

text: Algebraic numbers are those that are a solution to a polynomial equation with integer coefficients. Real numbers that are not rational numbers are called irrational numbers. Complex numbers which are not algebraic are called transcendental numbers. The algebraic numbers that are solutions of a monic polynomial equation with integer coefficients are called algebraic integers.


title: Number

text: Motivated by the classical problems of constructions with straightedge and compass, the constructible numbers are those complex numbers whose real and imaginary parts can be constructed using straightedge and compass, starting from a given segment of unit length, in a finite number of steps.


title: Number

text: A computable number, also known as "recursive number", is a real number such that there exists an algorithm which, given a positive number "n" as input, produces the first "n" digits of the computable number's decimal representation. Equivalent definitions can be given using μ-recursive functions, Turing machines or λ-calculus. The computable numbers are stable for all usual arithmetic operations, including the computation of the roots of a polynomial, and thus form a real closed field that contains the real algebraic numbers.


title: Number

text: The computable numbers may be viewed as the real numbers that may be exactly represented in a computer: a computable number is exactly represented by its first digits and a program for computing further digits. However, the computable numbers are rarely used in practice. One reason is that there is no algorithm for testing the equality of two computable numbers. More precisely, there cannot exist any algorithm which takes any computable number as an input, and decides in every case if this number is equal to zero or not.


title: Number

text: The set of computable numbers has the same cardinality as the natural numbers. Therefore, almost all real numbers are non-computable. However, it is very difficult to produce explicitly a real number that is not computable.


title: Number

text: The "p"-adic numbers may have infinitely long expansions to the left of the decimal point, in the same way that real numbers may have infinitely long expansions to the right. The number system that results depends on what base is used for the digits: any base is possible, but a prime number base provides the best mathematical properties. The set of the "p"-adic numbers contains the rational numbers, but is not contained in the complex numbers.


title: Number

text: The elements of an algebraic function field over a finite field and algebraic numbers have many similar properties (see Function field analogy). Therefore, they are often regarded as numbers by number theorists. The "p"-adic numbers play an important role in this analogy.


title: Number

text: Some number systems that are not included in the complex numbers may be constructed from the real numbers in a way that generalize the construction of the complex numbers. They are sometimes called hypercomplex numbers. They include the quaternions H, introduced by Sir William Rowan Hamilton, in which multiplication is not commutative, the octonions, in which multiplication is not associative in addition to not being commutative, and the sedenions, in which multiplication is not alternative, neither associative nor commutative.


title: Number

text: For dealing with infinite sets, the natural numbers have been generalized to the ordinal numbers and to the cardinal numbers. The former gives the ordering of the set, while the latter gives its size. For finite sets, both ordinal and cardinal numbers are identified with the natural numbers. In the infinite case, many ordinal numbers correspond to the same cardinal number.


title: Number

text: Hyperreal numbers are used in non-standard analysis. The hyperreals, or nonstandard reals (usually denoted as *R), denote an ordered field that is a proper extension of the ordered field of real numbers R and satisfies the transfer principle. This principle allows true first-order statements about R to be reinterpreted as true first-order statements about *R.


title: Number

text: Superreal and surreal numbers extend the real numbers by adding infinitesimally small numbers and infinitely large numbers, but still form fields.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace (, ; ; Low Alemannic German/ ; ; ) is a cultural region and a territorial collectivity in eastern France, on the west bank of the upper Rhine next to Germany and Switzerland. In 2020, it had a population of 1,898,533. Alsatian culture is characterized by a blend of Germanic and French influences.


title: Alsace

text: Until 1871, Alsace included the area now known as the Territoire de Belfort, which formed its southernmost part. From 1982 to 2016, Alsace was the smallest administrative "région" in metropolitan France, consisting of the Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin departments. Territorial reform passed by the French Parliament in 2014 resulted in the merger of the Alsace administrative region with Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine to form Grand Est. On 1 January 2021, the departments of Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin merged into the new European Collectivity of Alsace but remained part of the region Grand Est.


title: Alsace

text: Alsatian is an Alemannic dialect closely related to Swabian, although since World War II most Alsatians primarily speak French. Internal and international migration since 1945 has also changed the ethnolinguistic composition of Alsace. For more than 300 years, from the Thirty Years' War to World War II, the political status of Alsace was heavily contested between France and various German states in wars and diplomatic conferences. The economic and cultural capital of Alsace, as well as its largest city, is Strasbourg, which sits on the contemporary German international border. The city is the seat of several international organizations and bodies.


title: Alsace

text: The name "Alsace" can be traced to the Old High German or "Elisaz", meaning "foreign domain". An alternative explanation is from a Germanic "Ell-sass", meaning "seated on the Ill", a river in Alsace.


title: Alsace

text: In prehistoric times, Alsace was inhabited by nomadic hunters. Later the province became a diffuse border region between the French and the German cultures and languages. After the end of the Thirty Years War, southern Alsace was annexed by France in 1648, with most of the remainder conquered later in the century. In contrast to other parts of France, Protestants were permitted to practice their faith in Alsace even after the Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685 that abolished their privileges in the rest of France.


title: Alsace

text: After the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War, Alsace was annexed by Germany and became a part of the 1871 unified German Empire as a formal "Emperor's Land". After World War I the victorious Allies detached it from Germany and the province became part of the Third French Republic. After having been occupied and annexed by Germany during World War II, it was returned to France by the Allies at the end of World War II.


title: Alsace

text: The presence of hominids in Alsace can be traced back 600,000 years. By 4000 BCE farming, in the form of Linear Pottery Culture, or LBK, arrived in the region from the Danube and the Hungarian plain. LBK culture was characterized by "timber longhouse settlements and incised pottery ... favoring floodplain edge situations for their permanent villages ... [and] small clearings in the forest" for their crops and animals."


title: Alsace

text: By 100 BCE Germanic peoples, including eventually the Suebi and other tribes under Ariovistus, had begun to intrude into areas along the upper Rhine and Danube long settled by Celtic Gauls. Alsace itself had come to be occupied by the Triboci, a Germanic tribe allied with Ariovistus.


title: Alsace

text: In response to the threat posted by Ariovistus, the Aedui, a Celtic tribe allied to Rome, appealed to the Roman Senate and Julius Caesar for aid. In 58 BCE, after negotiations with Ariovistus failed, Julius Caesar routed the Suebi at the foot of the Vosges near what became Cernay in southern Alsace. There followed a "long period of security ... for the Gauls along the middle and upper Rhine."


title: Alsace

text: From the time of Augustus to the early fifth century AD, the area of Alsace was incorporated into the Roman province of Germania Superior. As a border province, the Romans built fortifications and military camps, many of which, including including Argentoratum (Strasbourg), evolved into modern towns and cities. The area also emerged as a center of viticulture.


title: Alsace

text: In 357 CE, Germanic tribes attempted to conquer Alsace but they were rebuffed by the Romans. With the decline of the Roman Empire, Alsace became the territory of the Germanic Alemanni. The Alemanni were agricultural people, and their Germanic language formed the basis of modern-day dialects spoken along the Upper Rhine (Alsatian, Alemannian, Swabian, Swiss). Clovis and the Franks defeated the Alemanni during the 5th century AD, culminating with the Battle of Tolbiac, and Alsace became part of the Kingdom of Austrasia. Under Clovis' Merovingian successors the inhabitants were Christianized. Alsace remained under Frankish control until the Frankish realm, following the Oaths of Strasbourg of 842, was formally dissolved in 843 at the Treaty of Verdun; the grandsons of Charlemagne divided the realm into three parts. Alsace formed part of the Middle Francia, which was ruled by the eldest grandson Lothar I.


title: Alsace

text: Lothar died early in 855 and his realm was divided into three parts. The part known as Lotharingia, or Lorraine, was given to Lothar's son. The rest was shared between Lothar's brothers Charles the Bald (ruler of the West Frankish realm) and Louis the German (ruler of the East Frankish realm). The Kingdom of Lotharingia was short-lived, however, becoming the stem duchy of Lorraine in Eastern Francia after the Treaty of Ribemont in 880. Alsace was united with the other Alemanni east of the Rhine into the stem duchy of Swabia.


title: Alsace

text: At about this time, the surrounding areas experienced recurring fragmentation and reincorporations among a number of feudal secular and ecclesiastical lordships, a common process in the Holy Roman Empire. Alsace experienced great prosperity during the 12th and 13th centuries under Hohenstaufen emperors.


title: Alsace

text: Frederick I set up Alsace as a province (a "procuratio", not a "provincia") to be ruled by ministeriales, a non-noble class of civil servants. The idea was that such men would be more tractable and less likely to alienate the fief from the crown out of their own greed. The province had a single provincial court ("Landgericht") and a central administration with its seat at Hagenau. Frederick II designated the Bishop of Strasbourg to administer Alsace, but the authority of the bishop was challenged by Count Rudolf of Habsburg, who received his rights from Frederick II's son Conrad IV. Strasbourg began to grow to become the most populous and commercially important town in the region.


title: Alsace

text: In 1262, after a long struggle with the ruling bishops, its citizens gained the status of free imperial city. A stop on the Paris-Vienna-Orient trade route, as well as a port on the Rhine route linking southern Germany and Switzerland to the Netherlands, England and Scandinavia, it became the political and economic center of the region. Cities such as Colmar and Hagenau also began to grow in economic importance and gained a kind of autonomy within the "Décapole" (or "Zehnstädtebund"), a federation of ten free towns.


title: Alsace

text: Though little is known about the early history of the Jews of Alsace, there is a lot of information from the 12th century onwards. They were successful as moneylenders and had the favor of the Emperor. As in much of Europe, the prosperity of Alsace was brought to an end in the 14th century by a series of harsh winters, bad harvests, and the Black Death. These hardships were blamed on Jews, leading to the pogroms of 1336 and 1339. In 1349, Jews of Alsace were accused of poisoning the wells with plague, leading to the massacre of thousands of Jews during the Strasbourg pogrom. Jews were subsequently forbidden to settle in the town. An additional natural disaster was the Rhine rift earthquake of 1356, one of Europe's worst which made ruins of Basel. Prosperity returned to Alsace under Habsburg administration during the Renaissance.


title: Alsace

text: Holy Roman Empire central power had begun to decline following years of imperial adventures in Italian lands, often ceding hegemony in Western Europe to France, which had long since centralized power. France began an aggressive policy of expanding eastward, first to the rivers Rhône and Meuse, and when those borders were reached, aiming for the Rhine. In 1299 the French proposed a marriage alliance between Blanche (sister of Philip IV of France) and Rudolf (son of Albert I of Germany), with Alsace to be the dowry; however, the deal never came off. In 1307, the town of Belfort was first chartered by the Counts of Montbéliard. During the next century, France was to be militarily shattered by the Hundred Years' War, which prevented for a time any further tendencies in this direction. After the conclusion of the war, France was again free to pursue its desire to reach the Rhine and in 1444 a French army appeared in Lorraine and Alsace. It took up winter quarters, demanded the submission of Metz and Strasbourg and launched an attack on Basel.


title: Alsace

text: In 1469, following the , Upper Alsace was sold by Archduke Sigismund of Austria to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Although Charles was the nominal landlord, taxes were paid to Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor. The latter was able to use this tax and a dynastic marriage to his advantage to gain back full control of Upper Alsace (apart from the free towns, but including Belfort) in 1477 when it became part of the demesne of the Habsburg family, who were also rulers of the empire. The town of Mulhouse joined the Swiss Confederation in 1515, where it was to remain until 1798.


title: Alsace

text: By the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, Strasbourg was a prosperous community, and its inhabitants accepted Protestantism in 1523. Martin Bucer was a prominent Protestant reformer in the region. His efforts were countered by the Roman Catholic Habsburgs who tried to eradicate heresy in Upper Alsace. As a result, Alsace was transformed into a mosaic of Catholic and Protestant territories. On the other hand, Mömpelgard (Montbéliard) to the southwest of Alsace, belonging to the Counts of Württemberg since 1397, remained a Protestant enclave in France until 1793.


title: Alsace

text: This situation prevailed until 1639, when most of Alsace was conquered by France to keep it out of the hands of the Spanish Habsburgs, who by secret treaty in 1617 had gained a clear road to their valuable and rebellious possessions in the Spanish Netherlands, the Spanish Road. Beset by enemies and seeking to gain a free hand in Hungary, the Habsburgs sold their Sundgau territory (mostly in Upper Alsace) to France in 1646, which had occupied it, for the sum of 1.2 million Thalers. When hostilities were concluded in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, most of Alsace was recognized as part of France, although some towns remained independent. The treaty stipulations regarding Alsace were complex. Although the French king gained sovereignty, existing rights and customs of the inhabitants were largely preserved. France continued to maintain its customs border along the Vosges mountains where it had been, leaving Alsace more economically oriented to neighbouring German-speaking lands. The German language remained in use in local administration, in schools, and at the (Lutheran) University of Strasbourg, which continued to draw students from other German-speaking lands. The 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, by which the French king ordered the suppression of French Protestantism, was not applied in Alsace. France did endeavour to promote Catholicism. Strasbourg Cathedral, for example, which had been Lutheran from 1524 to 1681, was returned to the Catholic Church. However, compared to the rest of France, Alsace enjoyed a climate of religious tolerance.


title: Alsace

text: France consolidated its hold with the 1679 Treaties of Nijmegen, which brought most remaining towns under its control. France seized Strasbourg in 1681 in an unprovoked action. These territorial changes were recognised in the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick that ended the War of the Grand Alliance.


title: Alsace

text: But Alsace still contained islands of territory nominally under the sovereignty of German princes and an independent city-state at Mulhouse. These enclaves were established by law, prescription and international consensus.


title: Alsace

text: The year 1789 brought the French Revolution and with it the first division of Alsace into the départements of Haut- and Bas-Rhin. Alsatians played an active role in the French Revolution. On 21 July 1789, after receiving news of the Storming of the Bastille in Paris, a crowd of people stormed the Strasbourg city hall, forcing the city administrators to flee and putting symbolically an end to the feudal system in Alsace. In 1792, Rouget de Lisle composed in Strasbourg the Revolutionary marching song "La Marseillaise" (as "Marching song for the Army of the Rhine"), which later became the anthem of France. "La Marseillaise" was played for the first time in April of that year in front of the mayor of Strasbourg Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich. Some of the most famous generals of the French Revolution also came from Alsace, notably Kellermann, the victor of Valmy, Kléber, who led the armies of the French Republic in Vendée and Westermann, who also fought in the Vendée.


title: Alsace

text: Mulhouse (a city in southern Alsace), which had been part of Switzerland since 1466, joined France in 1798.


title: Alsace

text: At the same time, some Alsatians were in opposition to the Jacobins and sympathetic to the restoration of the monarchy pursued by the invading forces of Austria and Prussia who sought to crush the nascent revolutionary republic. Many of the residents of the Sundgau made "pilgrimages" to places like Mariastein Abbey, near Basel, in Switzerland, for baptisms and weddings. When the French Revolutionary Army of the Rhine was victorious, tens of thousands fled east before it. When they were later permitted to return (in some cases not until 1799), it was often to find that their lands and homes had been confiscated. These conditions led to emigration by hundreds of families to newly vacant lands in the Russian Empire in 1803–4 and again in 1808. A poignant retelling of this event based on what Goethe had personally witnessed can be found in his long poem "Hermann and Dorothea".


title: Alsace

text: In response to the "hundred day" restoration of Napoleon I of France in 1815, Alsace along with other frontier provinces of France was occupied by foreign forces from 1815 to 1818, including over 280,000 soldiers and 90,000 horses in Bas-Rhin alone. This had grave effects on trade and the economy of the region since former overland trade routes were switched to newly opened Mediterranean and Atlantic seaports.


title: Alsace

text: The population grew rapidly, from 800,000 in 1814 to 914,000 in 1830 and 1,067,000 in 1846. The combination of economic and demographic factors led to hunger, housing shortages and a lack of work for young people. Thus, it is not surprising that people left Alsace, not only for Paris – where the Alsatian community grew in numbers, with famous members such as Georges-Eugène Haussmann – but also for more distant places like Russia and the Austrian Empire, to take advantage of the new opportunities offered there: Austria had conquered lands in Eastern Europe from the Ottoman Empire and offered generous terms to colonists as a way of consolidating its hold on the new territories. Many Alsatians also began to sail to the United States, settling in many areas from 1820 to 1850. In 1843 and 1844, sailing ships bringing immigrant families from Alsace arrived at the port of New York. Some settled in Texas and Illinois, many to farm or to seek success in commercial ventures: for example, the sailing ships "Sully" (in May 1843) and "Iowa" (in June 1844) brought families who set up homes in northern Illinois and northern Indiana. Some Alsatian immigrants were noted for their roles in 19th-century American economic development. Others ventured to Canada to settle in southwestern Ontario, notably Waterloo County.


title: Alsace

text: In contrast to the rest of France, the Jews in Alsace had not been expelled during the Middle Ages. By 1790, the Jewish population of Alsace was approximately 22,500, about 3% of the provincial population. They were highly segregated and subject to long-standing antisemitic regulations. They maintained their own customs, Yiddish language, and historic traditions within the tightly knit ghettos; they adhered to Jewish law. Jews were barred from most cities and instead lived in villages. They concentrated in trade, services, and especially in money lending. They financed about a third of the mortgages in Alsace. Official tolerance grew during the French Revolution, with full emancipation in 1791. However, local antisemitism also increased and Napoleon turned hostile in 1806, imposing a one-year moratorium on all debts owed to Jews. In the 1830–1870 era, most Jews moved to the cities, where they integrated and acculturated, as antisemitism sharply declined. By 1831, the state began paying salaries to official rabbis, and in 1846 a special legal oath for Jews was discontinued. Antisemitic local riots occasionally occurred, especially during the Revolution of 1848. The merger of Alsace into Germany in 1871–1918 lessened antisemitic violence. The constitution of the "Reichsland" of 1911 reserved one seat in the first chamber of the "Landtag" for a representative of the Jewish Consistory of Alsace-Lorraine (besides two seats respectively for the two main Christian denominations).


title: Alsace

text: The Franco-Prussian War, which started in July 1870, saw France defeated in May 1871 by the Kingdom of Prussia and other German states. The end of the war led to the unification of Germany. Otto von Bismarck annexed Alsace and northern Lorraine to the new German Empire in 1871. France ceded more than 90% of Alsace and one-fourth of Lorraine, as stipulated in the treaty of Frankfurt; Belfort, the largest Alsatian town south of Mulhouse, remained French. Unlike other member states of the German federation, which had governments of their own, the new "Imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine" was under the sole authority of the Kaiser, administered directly by the imperial government in Berlin. Between 100,000 and 130,000 Alsatians (of a total population of about a million and a half) chose to remain French citizens and leave "Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen", many of them resettling in French Algeria as Pieds-Noirs. Only in 1911 was Alsace-Lorraine granted some measure of autonomy, which was manifested also in a flag and an anthem (Elsässisches Fahnenlied). In 1913, however, the Saverne Affair ("French": Incident de Saverne) showed the limits of this new tolerance of the Alsatian identity.


title: Alsace

text: During the First World War, to avoid ground fights between brothers, many Alsatians served as sailors in the Kaiserliche Marine and took part in the Naval mutinies that led to the abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918, which left Alsace-Lorraine without a nominal head of state. The sailors returned home and tried to found an independent republic. While Jacques Peirotes, at this time deputy at the "Landrat Elsass-Lothringen" and just elected mayor of Strasbourg, proclaimed the forfeiture of the German Empire and the advent of the French Republic, a self-proclaimed government of Alsace-Lorraine declared its independence as the "Republic of Alsace-Lorraine". French troops entered Alsace less than two weeks later to quash the worker strikes and remove the newly established Soviets and revolutionaries from power. With the arrival of the French soldiers, many Alsatians and local Prussian/German administrators and bureaucrats cheered the re-establishment of order.


title: Alsace

text: Although U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had insisted that the "région" was self-ruling by legal status, as its constitution had stated it was bound to the sole authority of the Kaiser and not to the German state, France would allow no plebiscite, as granted by the League of Nations to some eastern German territories at this time, because the French regarded the Alsatians as Frenchmen liberated from German rule. Germany ceded the region to France under the Treaty of Versailles.


title: Alsace

text: Policies forbidding the use of German and requiring French were promptly introduced. In order not to antagonize the Alsatians, the region was not subjected to some legal changes that had occurred in the rest of France between 1871 and 1919, such as the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace-Lorraine was occupied by Germany in 1940 during the Second World War. Although it was never formally annexed, Alsace-Lorraine was incorporated into the Greater German Reich, which had been restructured into Reichsgau. Alsace was merged with Baden, and Lorraine with the Saarland, to become part of a planned Westmark. During the war, 130,000 young men from Alsace and Lorraine were conscripted into the German armies against their will (malgré-nous). There were some volunteers for the Waffen SS., although they were outnumbered by conscripts of the 1926–1927 classes. Thirty of said Waffen SS were involved in the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre (29 conscripts, one volunteer). A third of the malgré-nous perished on the Eastern front. In July 1944, 1500 malgré-nous were released from Soviet captivity and sent to Algiers, where they joined the Free French Forces.


title: Alsace

text: Today, the territory is in certain areas subject to some laws that are significantly different from the rest of France – this is known as the local law.


title: Alsace

text: In more recent years, the Alsatian language is again being promoted by local, national, and European authorities as an element of the region's identity. Alsatian is taught in schools (but not mandatory) as one of the regional languages of France. German is also taught as a foreign language in local kindergartens and schools. There is a growing network of schools proposing full immersion in Alsatian dialect and in Standard German, called "ABCM-Zweisprachigkeit" (ABCM -> French acronym for "Association for Bilingualism in the Classroom from Kindergarten onwards", Zweisprachigkeit -> German for "Bilingualism"). However, the Constitution of France still requires that French be the only official language of the Republic.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace has an area of 8,283 km, making it the smallest "région" of metropolitan France. It is almost four times longer than it is wide, corresponding to a plain between the Rhine in the east and the Vosges mountains in the west.


title: Alsace

text: It includes the "départements" of Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin (known previously as Sundgau and Nordgau). It borders Germany on the north and the east, Switzerland and Franche-Comté on the south and Lorraine on the west.


title: Alsace

text: Several valleys are also found in the "région". Its highest point is the Grand Ballon in Haut-Rhin, which reaches a height of 1426 m. It contains many forests, primarily in the Vosges and in Bas-Rhin (Haguenau Forest).


title: Alsace

text: Alsace is the part of the plain of the Rhine located at the west of the Rhine, on its left bank. It is a rift or graben, from the Oligocene epoch, associated with its horsts: the Vosges and the Black Forest.


title: Alsace

text: The Jura Mountains, formed by slip (induced by the alpine uplift) of the Mesozoic cover on the Triassic formations, goes through the area of Belfort.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace has a semi-continental climate at low altitude and a continental climate at high altitude. There is fairly low precipitation because the Vosges protect it from the west. The city of Colmar has a sunny microclimate; it is the second driest city in France, with an annual precipitation of 600 mm, making it ideal for "vin d'Alsace" ("Alsatian wine").


title: Alsace

text: Since 2021, Alsace is a territorial collectivity called the European Collectivity of Alsace ("collectivité européenne d'Alsace").


title: Alsace

text: The European Collectivity of Alsace is divided into 2 departmental constituencies ("circonscriptions départementales"), 9 departmental arrondissements, 40 cantons, and 880 communes.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace's population increased to 1,872,949 in 2014. It has regularly increased over time, except in wartime, by both natural growth and migration. This growth has even accelerated at the end of the 20th century. INSEE estimates that its population will grow 8.5% to 14.5% between 1999 and 2030.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace is generally seen as the most religious of all the French regions. Most of the Alsatian population is Roman Catholic, but, largely because of the region's German heritage, a significant Protestant community also exists: today, the EPCAAL (a Lutheran church) is France's second largest Protestant church, also forming an administrative union (UEPAL) with the much smaller Calvinist EPRAL. Unlike the rest of France, the Local law in Alsace-Moselle still provides for the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801 and the organic articles, which provides public subsidies to the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist churches, as well as to Jewish synagogues; religion classes in one of these faiths is compulsory in public schools. This divergence in policy from the French majority is due to the region having been part of Imperial Germany when the 1905 law separating the French church and state was instituted (for a more comprehensive history, see: Alsace-Lorraine). Controversy erupts periodically on the appropriateness of this legal disposition, as well as on the exclusion of other religions from this arrangement.


title: Alsace

text: Following the Protestant Reformation, promoted by local reformer Martin Bucer, the principle of "cuius regio, eius religio" led to a certain amount of religious diversity in the highlands of northern Alsace. Landowners, who as "local lords" had the right to decide which religion was allowed on their land, were eager to entice populations from the more attractive lowlands to settle and develop their property. Many accepted without discrimination Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Jews and Anabaptists. Multiconfessional villages appeared, particularly in the region of Alsace bossue. Alsace became one of the French regions boasting a thriving Jewish community, and the only region with a noticeable Anabaptist population. Philipp Jakob Spener who founded Pietism was born in Alsace. The schism of the Amish under the lead of Jacob Amman from the Mennonites occurred in 1693 in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines. The strongly Catholic Louis XIV tried in vain to drive them from Alsace. When Napoleon imposed military conscription without religious exception, most emigrated to the American continent.


title: Alsace

text: In 1707, the simultaneum forced many Reformed and Lutheran church buildings to also allow Catholic services. About 50 such "simultaneous churches" still exist in modern Alsace, though with the Catholic church's general lack of priests they tend to hold Catholic services only occasionally.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace historically was part of the Holy Roman Empire and the German realm of culture. Since the 17th century, the region has passed between German and French control numerous times, resulting in a cultural blend. German traits remain in the more traditional, rural parts of the culture, such as the cuisine and architecture, whereas modern institutions are totally dominated by French culture.


title: Alsace

text: Strasbourg's arms are the colours of the shield of the Bishop of Strasbourg (a band of red on a white field, also considered an inversion of the arms of the diocese) at the end of a revolt of the burghers during the Middle Ages who took their independence from the teachings of the Bishop. It retains its power over the surrounding area.


title: Alsace

text: There is controversy around the recognition of the Alsatian flag. The authentic historical flag is the "Rot-un-Wiss"; Red and White are commonly found on the coat of arms of Alsatian cities (Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Sélestat...) and of many Swiss cities, especially in Basel's region. The German region Hesse uses a flag similar to the Rot-un-Wiss. As it underlines the Germanic roots of the region, it was "replaced" in 1949 by a new "Union jack-like" flag representing the union of the two départements. It has, however, no real historical relevance. It has been since replaced again by a slightly different one, also representing the two départements. With the purpose of "Francizing" the region, the Rot-un-Wiss has not been recognized by Paris. Some overzealous statesmen have called it a Nazi invention – while its origins date back to the 11th century and the Red and White banner of Gérard de Lorraine (aka. d'Alsace). The Rot-un-Wiss flag is still known as the real historical emblem of the region by most of the population and the départements' parliaments and has been widely used during protests against the creation of a new "super-region" gathering Champagne-Ardennes, Lorraine and Alsace, namely on Colmar's statue of liberty.


title: Alsace

text: Although German dialects were spoken in Alsace for most of its history, the dominant language in Alsace today is French.


title: Alsace

text: The traditional language of the "région" is Alsatian, an Alemannic dialect of Upper German spoken on both sides of the Rhine and closely related to Swiss German. Some Frankish dialects of West Central German are also spoken in "Alsace Bossue" and in the extreme north of Alsace. As is customary for regional languages in France, neither Alsatian nor the Frankish dialects have any form of official status, although both are now recognized as languages of France and can be chosen as subjects in lycées.


title: Alsace

text: Although Alsace has been part of France multiple times in the past, the region had no direct connection with the French state for several centuries. From the end of the Roman Empire (5th century) to the French annexation (17th century), Alsace was politically part of the German world.


title: Alsace

text: During the Lutheran Reform, the towns of Alsace were the first to adopt the German language as their official language instead of Latin. It was in Strasbourg that German was first used for the liturgy. It was also in Strasbourg that the first German Bible was published in 1466.


title: Alsace

text: From the annexation of Alsace by France in the 17th century and the language policy of the French Revolution up to 1870, knowledge of French in Alsace increased considerably. With the education reforms of the 19th century, the middle classes began to speak and write French well. The French language never really managed, however, to win over the masses, the vast majority of whom continued to speak their German dialects and write in German (which we would now call "standard German").


title: Alsace

text: Between 1870 and 1918, Alsace was annexed by the German Empire in the form of an imperial province or Reichsland, and the mandatory official language, especially in schools, became High German. French lost ground to such an extent that it has been estimated that only 2% of the population spoke French fluently and only 8% had some knowledge of it (Maugue, 1970).


title: Alsace

text: After 1918, French was the only language used in schools, and particularly primary schools. After much argument and discussion and after many temporary measures, a memorandum was issued by Vice-Chancellor Pfister in 1927 and governed education in primary schools until 1939.


title: Alsace

text: During a reannexation by Germany (1940–1945), High German was reinstated as the language of education. The population was forced to speak German and 'French' family names were Germanized. Following the Second World War, the 1927 regulation was not reinstated and the teaching of German in primary schools was suspended by a provisional rectorial decree, which was supposed to enable French to regain lost ground. The teaching of German became a major issue, however, as early as 1946. Following World War II, the French government pursued, in line with its traditional language policy, a campaign to suppress the use of German as part of a wider Francization campaign.


title: Alsace

text: In 1951, Article 10 of the Deixonne Law ("Loi Deixonne") on the teaching of local languages and dialects made provision for Breton, Basque, Catalan and old Provençal, but not for Corsican, Dutch (West Flemish) or Alsatian in Alsace and Moselle. However, in a Decree of 18 December 1952, supplemented by an Order of 19 December of the same year, optional teaching of the German language was introduced in elementary schools in Communes where the language of habitual use was the Alsatian dialect.


title: Alsace

text: In 1972, the Inspector General of German, Georges Holderith, obtained authorization to reintroduce German into 33 intermediate classes on an experimental basis. This teaching of German, referred to as the Holderith Reform, was later extended to all pupils in the last two years of elementary school. This reform is still largely the basis of German teaching (but not Alsatian) in elementary schools today.


title: Alsace

text: It was not until 9 June 1982, with the "Circulaire sur la langue et la culture régionales en Alsace" (Memorandum on regional language and culture in Alsace) issued by the Vice-Chancellor of the Académie Pierre Deyon, that the teaching of German in primary schools in Alsace really began to be given more official status. The Ministerial Memorandum of 21 June 1982, known as the Circulaire Savary, introduced financial support, over three years, for the teaching of regional languages in schools and universities. This memorandum was, however, implemented in a fairly lax manner.


title: Alsace

text: Both Alsatian and Standard German were for a time banned from public life (including street and city names, official administration, and educational system). Though the ban has long been lifted and street signs today are often bilingual, Alsace-Lorraine is today predominantly French in language and culture. Few young people speak Alsatian today, although there do still exist one or two enclaves in the Sundgau region where some older inhabitants cannot speak French, and where Alsatian is still used as the mother tongue. A related Alemannic German survives on the opposite bank of the Rhine, in Baden, and especially in Switzerland. However, while French is the major language of the region, the Alsatian dialect of French is heavily influenced by German and other languages such as Yiddish in phonology and vocabulary.


title: Alsace

text: This situation has spurred a movement to preserve the Alsatian language, which is perceived as endangered, a situation paralleled in other "régions" of France, such as Brittany or Occitania. Alsatian is now taught in French high schools. Increasingly, French is the only language used at home and at work, whereas a growing number of people have a good knowledge of standard German as a foreign language learned in school.


title: Alsace

text: The constitution of the Fifth Republic states that French alone is the official language of the Republic. However, Alsatian, along with other regional languages, are recognized by the French government in the official list of languages of France.


title: Alsace

text: Although the French government signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 1992, it never ratified the treaty and therefore no legal basis exists for any of the regional languages in France. However, visitors to Alsace can see indications of renewed political and cultural interest in the language – in Alsatian signs appearing in car-windows and on hoardings, and in new official bilingual street signs in Strasbourg and Mulhouse.


title: Alsace

text: A 1999 INSEE survey, included in the 1999 Census, the majority of the population in Alsace speak French as their first language, 39.0% (or 500,000 people) of the population speak Alsatian, 16.2% (or 208,000 people) speak German, 75,200 people speak English (or 5.9%) and 27,600 people speak Italian.


title: Alsace

text: The survey counted 548,000 adult speakers of Alsatian in France, making it the second most-spoken regional language in the country (after Occitan). Like all regional languages in France, however, the transmission of Alsatian is on the decline. While 39% of the adult population of Alsace speak Alsatian, only one in four children speak it, and only one in ten children uses it regularly.


title: Alsace

text: The traditional habitat of the Alsatian lowland, like in other regions of Germany and Northern Europe, consists of houses constructed with walls in timber framing and cob and roofing in flat tiles. This type of construction is abundant in adjacent parts of Germany and can be seen in other areas of France, but their particular abundance in Alsace is owed to several reasons:


title: Alsace

text: However, half-timbering was found to increase the risk of fire, which is why from the 19th century, it began to be rendered. In recent times, villagers started to paint the rendering white in accordance with Beaux-Arts movements. To discourage this, the region's authorities gave financial grants to the inhabitants to paint the rendering in various colours, in order to return to the original style and many inhabitants accepted (more for financial reasons than by firm belief).


title: Alsace

text: Alsatian cuisine, somewhat based on German culinary traditions, is marked by the use of pork in various forms. It is perhaps mostly known for the region's wines and beers. Traditional dishes include "baeckeoffe", "flammekueche", "choucroute", and "fleischnacka". Southern Alsace, also called the Sundgau, is characterized by "carpe frite" (that also exists in Yiddish tradition).


title: Alsace

text: The festivities of the year's end involve the production of a great variety of biscuits and small cakes called "bredela" as well as "pain d'épices" (gingerbread cakes) which are baked around Christmas time. The Kugelhupf is also popular in Alsace, and the Christstollen during the Christmas season.


title: Alsace

text: The gastronomic symbol of the "région" is undoubtedly the Choucroute, a local variety of Sauerkraut. The word Sauerkraut in Alsatian has the form "sûrkrût", same as in other southwestern German dialects, and means "sour cabbage" as its Standard German equivalent. This word was included into the French language as "choucroute". To make it, the cabbage is finely shredded, layered with salt and juniper and left to ferment in wooden barrels. Sauerkraut can be served with poultry, pork, sausage or even fish. Traditionally it is served with Strasbourg sausage or frankfurters, bacon, smoked pork or smoked Morteau or Montbéliard sausages, or a selection of other pork products. Served alongside are often roasted or steamed potatoes or dumplings.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace is also well known for its foie gras made in the region since the 17th century. Additionally, Alsace is known for its fruit juices and mineral waters.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace is an important wine-producing "région". "Vins d'Alsace" (Alsace wines) are mostly white. Alsace produces some of the world's most noted dry rieslings and is the only region in France to produce mostly varietal wines identified by the names of the grapes used (wine from Burgundy is also mainly varietal, but not normally identified as such), typically from grapes also used in Germany. The most notable example is Gewurztraminer.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace is also the main beer-producing region of France, thanks primarily to breweries in and near Strasbourg. These include those of Fischer, Karlsbräu, Kronenbourg, and Heineken International. Hops are grown in Kochersberg and in northern Alsace. Schnapps is also traditionally made in Alsace, but it is in decline because home distillers are becoming less common and the consumption of traditional, strong, alcoholic beverages is decreasing.


title: Alsace

text: The stork is a main feature of Alsace and was the subject of many legends told to children. The bird practically disappeared around 1970, but re-population efforts are continuing. They are mostly found on roofs of houses, churches and other public buildings in Alsace.


title: Alsace

text: The Easter Bunny was first mentioned in Georg Franck von Franckenau's "De ovis paschalibus" (About Easter eggs) in 1682 referring to an Alsace tradition of an Easter Hare bringing Easter eggs.


title: Alsace

text: "Alsatia", the Latin form of Alsace's name, entered the English language as "a lawless place" or "a place under no jurisdiction" prior to the 17th century as a reflection of the British perception of the region at that time. It was used into the 20th century as a term for a ramshackle marketplace, "protected by ancient custom and the independence of their patrons". The word is still in use in the 21st century among the English and Australian judiciaries to describe a place where the law cannot reach: "In setting up the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the state has set out to create an Alsatia – a region of executive action free of judicial oversight," Lord Justice Sedley in UMBS v SOCA 2007.


title: Alsace

text: Derived from the above, "Alsatia" was historically a cant term for the area near Whitefriars, London, which was for a long time a sanctuary. It is first known in print in the title of "The Squire of Alsatia", a 1688 play written by Thomas Shadwell.


title: Alsace

text: According to the "Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques" (INSEE), Alsace had a gross domestic product of 44.3 billion euros in 2002. With a GDP per capita of €24,804, it was the second-place "région" of France, losing only to Île-de-France. 68% of its jobs are in the services; 25% are in industry, making Alsace one of France's most industrialised "régions".


title: Alsace

text: Alsace has many international ties and 35% of firms are foreign companies (notably German, Swiss, American, Japanese, and Scandinavian).


title: Alsace

text: Having been early and always densely populated, Alsace is famous for its high number of picturesque villages, churches and castles and for the various beauties of its three main towns, in spite of severe destructions suffered throughout five centuries of wars between France and Germany.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace is furthermore famous for its vineyards (especially along the 170 km of the "Route des Vins d'Alsace" from Marlenheim to Thann) and the Vosges mountains with their thick and green forests and picturesque lakes.


title: Alsace

text: Most major car journeys are made on the A35 autoroute, which links Saint-Louis on the Swiss border to Lauterbourg on the German border.


title: Alsace

text: The A4 toll road (towards Paris) begins northwest of Strasbourg and the A36 toll road towards Lyon, begins west from Mulhouse.


title: Alsace

text: Spaghetti junctions (built in the 1970s and 1980s) are prominent in the comprehensive system of motorways in Alsace, especially in the outlying areas of Strasbourg and Mulhouse. These cause a major buildup of traffic and are the main sources of pollution in the towns, notably in Strasbourg where the motorway traffic of the A35 was 170,000 per day in 2002.


title: Alsace

text: At present, plans are being considered for building a new dual carriageway west of Strasbourg, which would reduce the buildup of traffic in that area by picking up north and southbound vehicles and getting rid of the buildup outside Strasbourg. The line plans to link up the interchange of Hœrdt to the north of Strasbourg, with Innenheim in the southwest. The opening is envisaged at the end of 2011, with an average usage of 41,000 vehicles a day. Estimates of the French Works Commissioner however, raised some doubts over the interest of such a project, since it would pick up only about 10% of the traffic of the A35 at Strasbourg. Paradoxically, this reversed the situation of the 1950s. At that time, the French trunk road left of the Rhine not been built, so that traffic would cross into Germany to use the Karlsruhe-Basel Autobahn.


title: Alsace

text: To add to the buildup of traffic, the neighbouring German state of Baden-Württemberg has imposed a tax on heavy-goods vehicles using their Autobahnen. Thus, a proportion of the HGVs travelling from north Germany to Switzerland or southern Alsace bypasses the A5 on the Alsace-Baden-Württemberg border and uses the untolled French A35 instead.


title: Alsace

text: TER Alsace is the rail network serving Alsace. Its network is articulated around the city of Strasbourg. It is one of the most developed rail networks in France, financially sustained partly by the French railroad SNCF, and partly by the "région" Alsace.


title: Alsace

text: Because the Vosges are surmountable only by the Col de Saverne and the Belfort Gap, it has been suggested that Alsace needs to open up and get closer to France in terms of its rail links. Developments already under way or planned include:


title: Alsace

text: However, the abandoned Maurice-Lemaire tunnel towards Saint-Dié-des-Vosges was rebuilt as a toll road.


title: Alsace

text: Port traffic of Alsace exceeds 15 million tonnes, of which about three-quarters is centred on Strasbourg, which is the second busiest French fluvial harbour. The enlargement plan of the Rhône–Rhine Canal, intended to link up the Mediterranean Sea and Central Europe (Rhine, Danube, North Sea and Baltic Sea) was abandoned in 1998 for reasons of expense and land erosion, notably in the Doubs valley.


title: Alsace

text: Strasbourg is also two hours away by road from one of the largest European airports, Frankfurt Main, and 2 hours 30 minutes from Charles de Gaulle Airport through the direct TGV service, stopping in Terminal 2.


title: Alsace

text: Alsace is the most bicycle-friendly region of France, with of cycle routes. The network is of a very good standard and well signposted. All the towpaths of the canals in Alsace (canal des houillères de la Sarre, canal de la Marne au Rhin, canal de la Bruche, canal du Rhône au Rhin) are tarred.


title: Alsace

text: The following is a selection of people born in Alsace who have been particularly influential or successful in their respective fields.


title: Role-playing video game

text: A role-playing video game (commonly referred to as simply a role-playing game or RPG, as well as a computer role-playing game or CRPG) is a video game genre where the player controls the actions of a character (or several party members) immersed in some well-defined world, usually involving some form of character development by way of recording statistics. Many role-playing video games have origins in tabletop role-playing games and use much of the same , settings and game mechanics. Other major similarities with pen-and-paper games include developed story-telling and narrative elements, player character development, complexity, as well as replay value and immersion. The electronic medium removes the necessity for a gamemaster and increases combat resolution speed. RPGs have evolved from simple text-based console-window games into visually rich 3D experiences.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Role-playing video games use much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics as early tabletop role-playing games such as "Dungeons & Dragons".


title: Role-playing video game

text: Players control a central game character, or multiple game characters, usually called a party, and attain victory by completing a series of quests or reaching the conclusion of a central storyline. Players explore a game world, while solving puzzles and engaging in combat. A key feature of the genre is that characters grow in power and abilities, and characters are typically designed by the player. RPGs rarely challenge a player's physical coordination or reaction time, with the exception of action role-playing games.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Role-playing video games typically rely on a highly developed story and setting, which is divided into a number of quests. Players control one or several characters by issuing commands, which are performed by the character at an effectiveness determined by that character's numeric attributes. Often these attributes increase each time a character gains a level, and a character's level goes up each time the player accumulates a certain amount of experience.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Role-playing video games also typically attempt to offer more complex and dynamic character interaction than what is found in other video game genres. This usually involves additional focus on the artificial intelligence and scripted behavior of computer-controlled non-player characters.


title: Role-playing video game

text: The premise of many role-playing games tasks the player with saving the world, or whichever level of society is threatened. There are often twists and turns as the story progresses, such as the surprise appearance of estranged relatives, or enemies who become friends or vice versa. The game world is often rooted in speculative fiction (i.e. fantasy or science fiction), which allows players to do things they cannot do in real life and helps players suspend their disbelief about the rapid character growth. To a lesser extent, settings closer to the present day or near future are possible.


title: Role-playing video game

text: The story often provides much of the entertainment in the game. Because these games have strong storylines, they can often make effective use of recorded dialog and voiceover narration. Players of these games tend to appreciate long cutscenes more than players of faster action games. While most games advance the plot when the player defeats an enemy or completes a level, role-playing games often progress the plot based on other important decisions. For example, a player may make the decision to join a guild, thus triggering a progression in the storyline that is usually irreversible. New elements in the story may also be triggered by mere arrival in an area, rather than completing a specific challenge. The plot is usually divided so that each game location is an opportunity to reveal a new chapter in the story.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Pen-and-paper role-playing games typically involve a player called the gamemaster (or GM for short) who can dynamically create the story, setting, and rules, and react to a player's choices. In role-playing video games, the computer performs the function of the gamemaster. This offers the player a smaller set of possible actions, since computers can't engage in imaginative acting comparable to a skilled human gamemaster. In exchange, the typical role-playing video game may have storyline branches, user interfaces, and stylized cutscenes and gameplay to offer a more direct storytelling mechanism. Characterization of non-player characters in video games is often handled using a dialog tree. Saying the right things to the right non-player characters will elicit useful information for the player, and may even result in other rewards such as items or experience, as well as opening up possible storyline branches. Multiplayer online role-playing games can offer an exception to this contrast by allowing human interaction among multiple players and in some cases enabling a player to perform the role of a gamemaster.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Exploring the world is an important aspect of many RPGs. Players will walk through, talking to non-player characters, picking up objects, and avoiding traps. Some games such as "NetHack", "Diablo", and the "FATE" series randomize the structure of individual levels, increasing the game's variety and replay value. Role-playing games where players complete quests by exploring randomly generated dungeons and which include permadeath are called roguelikes, named after the 1980 video game "Rogue".


title: Role-playing video game

text: The game's story is often mapped onto exploration, where each chapter of the story is mapped onto a different location. RPGs usually allow players to return to previously visited locations. Usually, there is nothing left to do there, although some locations change throughout the story and offer the player new things to do in response. Players must acquire enough power to overcome a major challenge in order to progress to the next area, and this structure can be compared to the boss characters at the end of levels in action games.


title: Role-playing video game

text: The player typically must complete a linear sequence of certain quests in order to reach the end of the game's story. Many RPGs also often allow the player to seek out optional side-quests and character interactions. Quests of this sort can be found by talking to a non-player character, and there may be no penalty for abandoning or ignoring these quests other than a missed opportunity or reward.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Players can find loot (such as clothing, weapons, and armor) throughout the game world and collect it. Players can trade items for currency and better equipment. Trade takes place while interacting with certain friendly non-player characters, such as shopkeepers, and often uses a specialized trading screen. Purchased items go into the player's inventory. Some games turn inventory management into a logistical challenge by limiting the size of the player's inventory, thus forcing the player to decide what they must carry at the time. This can be done by limiting the maximum weight that a player can carry, by employing a system of arranging items in a virtual space, or by simply limiting the number of items that can be held.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Most of the actions in an RPG are performed indirectly, with the player selecting an action and the character performing it by their own accord. Success at that action depends on the character's numeric attributes. Role-playing video games often simulate dice-rolling mechanics from non-electronic role-playing games to determine success or failure. As a character's attributes improve, their chances of succeeding at a particular action will increase.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Many role-playing games allow players to play as an evil character. Although robbing and murdering indiscriminately may make it easier to get money, there are usually consequences in that other characters will become uncooperative or even hostile towards the player. Thus, these games allow players to make moral choices, but force players to live with the consequences of their actions. Games often let the player control an entire party of characters. However, if winning is contingent upon the survival of a single character, then that character effectively becomes the player's avatar. An example of this would be in "Baldur's Gate", where if the character created by the player dies, the game ends and a previous save needs to be loaded.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Although some single-player role-playing games give the player an avatar that is largely predefined for the sake of telling a specific story, many role-playing games make use of a character creation screen. This allows players to choose their character's sex, their race or species, and their character class. Although many of these traits are cosmetic, there are functional aspects as well. Character classes will have different abilities and strengths. Common classes include fighters, spellcasters, thieves with stealth abilities, and clerics with healing abilities, or a mixed class, such as a fighter who can cast simple spells. Characters will also have a range of physical attributes such as dexterity and strength, which affect a player's performance in combat. Mental attributes such as intelligence may affect a player's ability to perform and learn spells, while social attributes such as charisma may limit the player's choices while conversing with non-player characters. These attribute systems often strongly resemble the "Dungeons & Dragons" ruleset.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Some role-playing games make use of magical powers, or equivalents such as psychic powers or advanced technology. These abilities are confined to specific characters such as mages, spellcasters, or magic-users. In games where the player controls multiple characters, these magic-users usually complement the physical strength of other classes. Magic can be used to attack, to defend, or to temporarily change an enemy or ally's attributes. While some games allow players to gradually consume a spell, as ammunition is consumed by a gun, most games offer players a finite amount of mana which can be spent on any spell. Mana is restored by resting or by consuming potions. Characters can also gain other non-magical skills, which stay with the character as long as he lives.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Although the characterization of the game's avatar will develop through storytelling, characters may also become more functionally powerful by gaining new skills, weapons, and magic. This creates a positive-feedback cycle that is central to most role-playing games: The player grows in power, allowing them to overcome more difficult challenges, and gain even more power. This is part of the appeal of the genre, where players experience growing from an ordinary person into a superhero with amazing powers. Whereas other games give the player these powers immediately, the player in a role-playing game will choose their powers and skills as they gain experience.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Role-playing games usually measure progress by counting experience points and character levels. Experience is usually earned by defeating enemies in combat, with some games offering experience for completing certain quests or conversations. Experience becomes a form of score, and accumulating a certain amount of experience will cause the character's level to go up. This is called "levelling up", and gives the player an opportunity to raise one or more of his character's attributes. Many RPGs allow players to choose how to improve their character, by allocating a finite number of points into the attributes of their choice. Gaining experience will also unlock new magic spells for characters that use magic.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Some role-playing games also give the player specific skill points, which can be used to unlock a new skill or improve an existing one. This may sometimes be implemented as a skill tree. As with the technology trees seen in strategy video games, learning a particular skill in the tree will unlock more powerful skills deeper in the tree.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Three different systems of rewarding the player characters for solving the tasks in the game can be set apart: the "experience system" (also known as the "level-based" system), the "training system" (also known as the "skill-based" system) and the "skill-point system" (also known as "level-free" system)


title: Role-playing video game

text: Older games often separated combat into its own mode of gameplay, distinct from exploring the game world. More recent games tend to maintain a consistent perspective for exploration and combat. Some games, especially earlier video games, generate battles from random encounters; more modern RPGs are more likely to have persistent wandering monsters that move about the game world independently of the player. Most RPGs also use stationary boss monsters in key positions, and automatically trigger battles with them when the PCs enter these locations or perform certain actions. Combat options typically involve positioning characters, selecting which enemy to attack, and exercising special skills such as casting spells.


title: Role-playing video game

text: In a classical turn-based system, only one character may act at a time; all other characters remain still, with a few exceptions that may involve the use of special abilities. The order in which the characters act is usually dependent on their attributes, such as speed or agility. This system rewards strategic planning more than quickness. It also points to the fact that realism in games is a means to the end of immersion in the game world, not an end in itself. A turn-based system makes it possible, for example, to run within range of an opponent and kill him before he gets a chance to act, or duck out from behind hard cover, fire, and retreat back without an opponent being able to fire, which are of course both impossibilities. However, tactical possibilities have been created by this unreality that did not exist before; the player determines whether the loss of immersion in the reality of the game is worth the satisfaction gained from the development of the tactic and its successful execution. "Fallout" has been cited as being a good example of such a system.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Real-time combat can import features from action games, creating a hybrid action RPG game genre. But other RPG battle systems such as the "Final Fantasy" battle systems have imported real-time choices without emphasizing coordination or reflexes. Other systems combine real-time combat with the ability to pause the game and issue orders to all characters under his/her control; when the game is unpaused, all characters follow the orders they were given. This "real-time with pause" system ("RTwP") has been particularly popular in games designed by BioWare. The most famous RTwP engine is the Infinity Engine. Other names for "real-time with pause" include "active pause" and "semi real-time". Tactical RPG maker Apeiron named their system Smart Pause Mode (SPM) because it would automatically pause based on a number of user-configurable settings. "" and "" offered players the option to play in either turn-based or RTwP mode via a configuration setting. The latter also offered a "fast turn-based" mode, though all three of the game's modes were criticized for being poorly balanced and oversimplified.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Early "Ultima" games featured timed turns: they were strictly turn-based, but if the player waited more than a second or so to issue a command, the game would automatically issue a pass command, allowing the monsters to take a turn while the PCs did nothing.


title: Role-playing video game

text: There is a further subdivision by the structure of the battle system; in many early games, such as "Wizardry", monsters and the party are arrayed into ranks, and can only attack enemies in the front rank with melee weapons. Other games, such as most of the "Ultima" series, employed duplicates of the miniatures combat system traditionally used in the early role-playing games. Representations of the player characters and monsters would move around an arena modeled after the surrounding terrain, attacking any enemies that are sufficiently near.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Earlier role-playing video games used two-dimensional top-down view, or tile-based first-person view. Early action-based role-playing games often used side-scrolling view. Most notably since "Ultima Underworld" (1992), role-playing games started implementing true three-dimensional (3D) graphics, where players typically navigate the game world from a first or third-person perspective. However, an isometric or aerial top-down perspective is common in party-based RPGs, in order to give the player a clear view of their entire party and their surroundings.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Role-playing games require the player to manage a large amount of information, and frequently make use of a windowed interface. For example, spell-casting characters will often have a menu of spells they can use. On the PC, players typically use the mouse to click on icons and menu options, while console games have the player navigate through menus using a game controller.


title: Role-playing video game

text: The role-playing video game genre began in the mid-1970s on mainframe computers, inspired by pen-and-paper role-playing games such as "Dungeons & Dragons". Several other sources of inspiration for early role-playing video games also included tabletop wargames, sports simulation games, adventure games such as "Colossal Cave Adventure", fantasy writings by authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, traditional strategy games such as chess, and ancient epic literature dating back to "Epic of Gilgamesh" which followed the same basic structure of setting off in various quests in order to accomplish goals.


title: Role-playing video game

text: After the success of role-playing video games such as "Ultima" and "Wizardry", which in turn served as the blueprint for "Dragon Quest" and "Final Fantasy", the role-playing genre eventually diverged into two styles, "Eastern role-playing games" and "Western role-playing games", due to cultural differences, though roughly mirroring the platform divide between consoles and computers, respectively. Finally, while the first RPGs offered strictly a single player experience, the popularity of multiplayer modes rose sharply during the early to mid-1990s with action role-playing games such as "Secret of Mana" and "Diablo". With the advent of the Internet, multiplayer games have grown to become massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), including "Lineage", "Final Fantasy XI", and "World of Warcraft".


title: Role-playing video game

text: The role-playing video game genre began in the mid-1970s, as an offshoot of early university mainframe text-based RPGs on PDP-10 and Unix-based computers, such as "Dungeon", pedit5 and dnd. In 1980, a very popular dungeon crawler, "Rogue", was released. Featuring ASCII graphics where the setting, monsters and items were represented by letters and a deep system of gameplay, it inspired a whole genre of similar clones on mainframe and home computers called "roguelikes".


title: Role-playing video game

text: One of the earliest role-playing video games on a microcomputer was "Dungeon n Dragons", written by Peter Trefonas and published by CLOAD (1980). This early game, published for a TRS-80 Model 1, is just 16K long and includes a limited word parser command line, character generation, a store to purchase equipment, combat, traps to solve, and a dungeon to explore. Other contemporaneous CRPGs (Computer Role Playing Games) were "Temple of Apshai", "" and "", the precursor to "Ultima". Some early microcomputer RPGs (such as "Telengard" (1982) or "Sword of Fargoal") were based on their mainframe counterparts, while others (such as "Ultima" or "Wizardry", the most successful of the early CRPGs) were loose adaptations of "D&D". They also include both first-person displays and overhead views, sometimes in the same game ("Akalabeth", for example, uses both perspectives). Most of the key features of RPGs were developed in this early period, prior to the release of "", one of the prime influences on both computer and console RPG development. For example, "Wizardry" features menu-driven combat, "Tunnels of Doom" features tactical combat on a special "combat screen", and "Dungeons of Daggorath" features real-time combat which takes place on the main dungeon map.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Starting in 1984 with "Questron" and "50 Mission Crush", SSI produced many series of CRPGs. Their 1985 game "Phantasie" is notable for introducing automapping and in-game scrolls providing hints and background information. They also released "Pool of Radiance" in 1988, the first of several "Gold Box" CRPGs based on the "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules". These games feature a first-person display for movement, combined with an overhead tactical display for combat. One common feature of RPGs from this era, which Matt Barton calls the "Golden Age" of computer RPGs, is the use of numbered "paragraphs" printed in the manual or adjunct booklets, containing the game's lengthier texts; the player can be directed to read a certain paragraph, instead of being shown the text on screen. The ultimate exemplar of this approach is Sir-Tech's "Star Saga" trilogy (of which only two games were released); the first game contains 888 "textlets" (usually much longer than a single paragraph) spread across 13 booklets, while the second contains 50,000 paragraphs spread across 14 booklets. Most of the games from this era are turn-based, although "Dungeon Master" and its imitators have real-time combat. Other classic titles from this era include "The Bard's Tale" (1985), "Wasteland" (1988), the start of the "Might and Magic" (1986–2014) series and the continuing "Ultima" (1981–1999) series.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Later, in the middle to late 1990s, isometric, sprite-based RPGs became commonplace, with video game publishers Interplay Entertainment and Blizzard North playing a lead role with such titles as the "Baldur's Gate", "Icewind Dale" and the action-RPG "Diablo" series, as well as the dialogue-heavy "" and cult classics "Fallout" and "Fallout 2". This era also saw a move toward 3D game engines with such games as "" and "". TSR, dissatisfied with SSI's later products, such as "" and "Menzoberranzan", transferred the "AD&D" license to several different developers, and eventually gave it to BioWare, who used it in "Baldur's Gate" (1998) and several later games. By the 2000s, 3D engines had become dominant.


title: Role-playing video game

text: The earliest RPG on a console was "Dragonstomper" on the Atari 2600 in 1982. Another early RPG on a console was "Bokosuka Wars", originally released for the Sharp X1 computer in 1983 and later ported to the MSX in 1984, the NES in 1985 and the Sharp X68000 as "New Bokosuka Wars". The game laid the foundations for the tactical role-playing game genre, or "simulation RPG" genre as it is known in Japan. It was also an early example of a real-time, action role-playing game. In 1986, Chunsoft created the NES title "Dragon Quest" (called "Dragon Warrior" in North America until the ), which drew inspiration from computer RPGs "Ultima" and "Wizardry" and is regarded as the template for future Japanese role-playing video games released since then.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Also in 1986 The Legend of Zelda was released for the NES, while not generally considered an RPG itself did inspire many aspects of future action-RPGs.


title: Role-playing video game

text: In 1987, the genre came into its own with the release of several highly influential console RPGs distinguishing themselves from computer RPGs, including the genre-defining Phantasy Star, released for the Master System. Shigeru Miyamoto's "" for the Famicom Disk System was one of the earliest action role-playing games, combining the action-adventure game framework of its predecessor "The Legend of Zelda" with the statistical elements of turn-based RPGs. Most RPGs at this time were turn-based. "Faxanadu" was another early action RPG for the NES, released as a side-story to the computer action RPG "". Square's "Final Fantasy" for the NES introduced side-view battles, with the player characters on the right and the enemies on the left, which soon became the norm for numerous console RPGs. In 1988, "Dragon Warrior III" introduced a character progression system allowing the player to change the party's character classes during the course of the game. Another "major innovation was the introduction of day/night cycles; certain items, characters, and quests are only accessible at certain times of day." In 1989, "Phantasy Star II" for the Genesis established many conventions of the genre, including an epic, dramatic, character-driven storyline dealing with serious themes and subject matter.


title: Role-playing video game

text: Console RPGs distinguished themselves from computer RPGs to a greater degree in the early 1990s. As console RPGs became more heavily story-based than their computer counterparts, one of the major differences that emerged during this time was in the portrayal of the characters. Console RPGs often featured intricately related characters who had distinctive personalities and traits, with players assuming the roles of people who cared about each other, fell in love or even had families. Romance in particular was a theme that was common in most console RPGs at the time but absent from most computer RPGs. During the 1990s, console RPGs had become increasingly dominant, exerting a greater influence on computer RPGs than the other way around. Console RPGs had eclipsed computer RPGs for some time, though computer RPGs began making a comeback towards the end of the decade with interactive choice-filled adventures.