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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.
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.
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 ...
German is the main language of about 90 million people (18%) in the EU. 67% of German citizens claim to be able to communicate in at least one foreign language, 27% in at least two languages other than their first.
Due to the German diaspora, many other countries with sizable populations of (mostly bilingual) German L1 speakers include Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Paraguay, as well as the United States. [21] However, in none of these countries does German or a German variety have any legal status.
The German endonym Deutsche is derived from the Old High German term diutisc, which means "ethnic" or "relating to the people". This term was used for speakers of West-Germanic languages in Central Europe since at least the 8th century, after which time a distinct German ethnic identity began to emerge among at least some them living within the ...
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, German, French, Italian, and English. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, [4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe.)
The official language of Germany is German, [2] with over 95 percent of the country speaking Standard German or a dialect of German as their first language. [3] This figure includes speakers of Northern Low Saxon, a recognized minority or regional language that is not considered separately from Standard German in statistics.