Hallo Leute, ich bin Mike und ihr seht Deutsch für euch.
It does derive from Frau, but it is spelt with an e, not with an a, so just to get that out of the way.
Now, Fräulein literally means something like a little woman, because it is a diminutive form.
As you guys probably know from previous videos of mine or just in general, the ending lein makes things small and cute, just like also the ending chen.
Now what it also does, besides making things cute, is it makes them neutral.
So whereas we would say die Frau, because we're talking about a woman, we would then have to say das Fräulein, because lein and schen overwrite natural, or not natural, but grammatical gender by always having the neutral gender assigned to them.
So through that, in modern speech, Fräulein sounds kind of cute, which on itself wouldn't be a problem, but combined with the fact that you're basically turning a full human adult it would still say Frau, meaning that the word Fräulein has been wiped completely from our official language and can therefore mostly be found in colloquial or spoken language, either by old people who are just used to it and are still using it, or, and this is the more likely case usually, used in a demeaning manner.
So all in all, it's just not appropriate.
So that means nowadays German does not have a title to differentiate between a married and an unmarried woman.
You might think that's a bad thing, but on the other hand, we never had titles to differentiate between a married and an unmarried man.
