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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.
Around the world, German has approximately 100 million native speakers and also about 80 million non-native speakers. [5] 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. [1]
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.
About 30,000 people still speak German as a native tongue today, mostly descendants of German colonial settlers. [46] The period of German colonialism in Namibia also led to the evolution of a Standard German-based pidgin language called "Namibian Black German", which became a second language for parts of the indigenous population. Although it ...
Germany, [e] officially the Federal Republic of Germany, [f] is a country in Central Europe.It lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen constituent states have a total population of over 82 million in an area of 357,596 km 2 (138,069 sq mi), making it the most populous member state of the European Union.
The term "Germanic religion" is sometimes applied to practices dating to as early as the Stone Age or Bronze Age, but its use is more generally restricted to the time period after the Germanic languages had become distinct from other Indo-European languages (early Iron Age). Germanic paganism covers a period of around one thousand years in ...
Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch originating from the Afrikaners of South Africa, with over 7.1 million native speakers; [6] Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it [7 ...
[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. [30]