German speaking countries
German is an official language in Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium and is spoken in 14 other countries as monther tongue by a part of the population. The German language (native name: Deutsch) has its roots in the Indo-European language family.With 75.50 million native speakers, German has the highest prevalence in Germany. A total of about 96.58 million people worldwide speak German as their mother tongue.
German native speakers around the world
Most native German speakers outside Europe are found in the traditional immigration country of the USA. Around 2.0 million inhabitants speak German from birth. Nearly half a million German speakers currently live in Canada as well.Since the 18th century, many Germans settled in Russia due to invitations from various tsars. Despite assimilation with various Russian dialects, there are still about two million inhabitants who speak German as their mother tongue. Earlier, during the 12th century, many Germans migrated to Eastern Europe to the region of today's Baltic States. According to today's counts, the number of Baltic Germans has been reduced to a few thousand. In total, it is assumed that about 1,000 to 2,000 Balts still use German as their mother tongue. The number in Poland is currently still around half a million.
The descendants of German colonists in Africa are hardly significant in terms of numbers, but in Namibia, there are still 22,000 speakers. In the former colony areas of Cameroon and Kenya, too, German as a foreign language is quite well known, but native speakers are hardly found. Brazil was a predominantly German-speaking country at the beginning of the 20th century. However, due to the growing influence of the Portuguese, especially during and after World War II, the language was increasingly displaced. Today, about one million German native speakers still live there, but they hardly ever learn German as their sole mother tongue.
German language - difficult language
German is the most spoken native language in Europe, yet it is not easy to learn because of the mutated vowels, the worldwide unique "ß," the word composition and the three genders. Most Romance languages only know masculine and feminine nouns. Why "das Mädchen" (the girl) is clearly feminine, but has a neutral article, is not explainable for many foreign language learners. The fact that nouns are always written in capital letters makes reading a bit easier, but even for the neighboring countries, it takes some time to get used to.The word combinations, which sometimes seem strange even to native German speakers, cause head-shaking. In the Duden corpus (official dictionary of the Standard High German language), there was actually once the 85-character long "Schauspielerbetreuungsflugbuchungsstatisterieleitungsgastspielorganisationsspezialist". Whoever then deals with laws stumbles over word monstrosities such as "Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz". In addition, there are foreign words and loan words that have been adopted from other languages. The Duden editorial office determined a foreign word share of eight to nine percent in an average newspaper article.
| Country | Region | Official language | Distribution | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | Western Europe | yes | 90.1 % | 75,502,000 |
| Austria | Western Europe | yes | 88.6 % | 8,011,000 |
| Switzerland | Western Europe | yes | 62.5 % | 5,485,000 |
| Russia | Eastern Europe | no | 1.5 % | 2,164,000 |
| United States of America | North America | no | 0.6 % | 2,000,000 |
| Brazil | South America | no | 0.5 % | 1,077,000 |
| Kazakhstan | Central Asia | no | 3.1 % | 608,000 |
| Canada | North America | no | 1.3 % | 506,000 |
| Poland | Eastern Europe | no | 1.3 % | 479,000 |
| Italy | Southern Europe | no | 0.5 % | 295,000 |
| Belgium | Western Europe | yes | 0.7 % | 82,000 |
| Romania | Eastern Europe | no | 0.4 % | 76,000 |
| Hungary | Eastern Europe | no | 0.7 % | 68,000 |
| Paraguay | South America | no | 0.9 % | 61,000 |
| Czechia | Eastern Europe | no | 0.5 % | 53,000 |
| Liechtenstein | Western Europe | yes | 94.5 % | 37,000 |
| Denmark | Northern Europe | no | 0.5 % | 30,000 |
| Namibia | Southern Africa | no | 0.9 % | 23,000 |
| Luxembourg | Western Europe | yes | 2.3 % | 15,000 |
| Belize | Central America | no | 3.1 % | 13,000 |
Risk of confusion
As in several other languages, there is frequent confusion. This is particularly common in English, where the terms sound very similar.German is the name of a single language, which in turn is subdivided into dialects. Germanic languages, on the other hand, are an entire language family consisting of several languages. These include English, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, for example. Almost half a billion native speakers speak one of these Germanic languages without having anything to do with Germany. The name goes back to the Germanic tribes from pre-Christian times who lived in Central and Northern Europe at that time.
Unless otherwise described in the text, this page is about native speakers — not the total number of speakers. How many people understand or speak German as a subsequently learned language is not the subject of this page. Countries where native speakers make up only a few thousand, or even a few hundred people, or countries with a percentage well below 1% are unlikely to be listed here.
Official language, national language or lingua franca: explanation of frequently used terms