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Mostly depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties with a disputed status as separate languages or which were later acknowledged as separate languages (e.g., Low German/Plautdietsch [1]), it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language, [2] [3] [4] 10–25 million as a second language ...
Cologne Cathedral is a World Heritage Site.. Christianity is the largest religion in Germany.It was introduced to the area of modern Germany by 300 AD, while parts of that area belonged to the Roman Empire, and later, when Franks and other Germanic tribes converted to Christianity from the fifth century onwards.
Due to the German diaspora, many other countries with sizable populations of (mostly bilingual) German L1 speakers include Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, as well as the United States. [21] However, in none of these countries does German or a German variety have any legal status.
[7] [17] German and Low German are West Germanic languages closely related to Dutch, Frisian languages (in particular North Frisian and Saterland Frisian), Luxembourgish, and English. [7] Modern Standard German is based on High German and Central German , and is the first or second language of most Germans, but notably not the Volga Germans .
In Northern Germany, High German was a foreign language to most inhabitants, whose native dialects were subsets of Low German. It was usually encountered only in writing or formal speech; in fact, most of High German was a written language, not identical to any spoken dialect, throughout the German-speaking area until well into the 19th century.
The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. [13] The German term Deutschland, originally diutisciu land ('the German lands'), is derived from deutsch (cf. Dutch), descended from Old High German diutisc 'of the people' (from diot or diota 'people'), originally used to distinguish the language of ...
The German diaspora (German: Deutschstämmige, pronounced [ˈdɔɪ̯t͡ʃˌʃtɛmɪɡə] ⓘ) consists of German people and their descendants who live outside of Germany. The term is used in particular to refer to the aspects of migration of German speakers from Central Europe to different countries around the world.
The colloquial speech is a compromise between Standard German and the dialect. [13] Northern Germany (the Low German area) is characterized by a loss of dialects: standard German is the vernacular, with very few regional features even in informal situations. [12] In Central Germany (the Middle German area) there is a tendency towards dialect ...