0_Wizard
I like learning about the German language and talking with Germans
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German language
German ( ) is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and (co-) official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol (Italy), the German-speaking Community of Belgium, and Liechtenstein. It is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg. The languages which are most similar to German are the other members of the West Germanic language branch: Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, Low German/Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, and Yiddish. German is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English. One of the major languages of the world, German is the first language of about 95 million people worldwide and the most widely spoken native language in the European Union.
German Americans
German Americans () are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the ancestry groups reported by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey. The group accounts for about one third of the total ethnic German population in the world. None of the German states had American colonies. In the 1670s, the first significant groups of German immigrants arrived in the British colonies, settling primarily in Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. Immigration continued in very large numbers during the 19th century, with eight million arrivals from Germany.
Germans
Germans () are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe, who share a common German ancestry, culture and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans. The English term "Germans" has historically referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Before the collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany in 1990, Germans constituted the largest "divided" nation in Europe by far. Ever since the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, German society has been characterized by a Catholic-Protestant divide.
German Brazilians
German Brazilians (German: "Deutschbrasilianer", Riograndenser Hunsrückisch: "Deitschbrasiliooner", ) refers to Brazilian people of ethnic German ancestry or origin. German Brazilians live mostly in the country's South Region, with lesser but still significant degree in the Southeast Region. German dialects together make up the second most spoken first language in Brazil after Portuguese. A few Brazilian municipalities have Brazilian Hunsrückisch and Germanic East Pomeranian as co-official with Portuguese. They are located in Southern Brazil and Espírito Santo. In the year 2000 Brazilian census 12 million people in Brazil claimed to be of German descent.
Geographical distribution of German speakers
In addition to the German-speaking area ("") in Europe, German-speaking minorities are present in many countries and on all six inhabited continents. Mostly depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties with a disputed status as separate languages (e.g., Low German/Plautdietsch,), it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language, 10-25 million as a second language, and 75–100 million as a foreign language. This would imply approximately 175-220 million German speakers worldwide. The German language is spoken in a number of countries and territories in Europe, where it is used both as an official language and as a minority language in various countries.
Germanisation
Germanisation (also spelled Germanization) is the spread of the German language, people and culture or policies which introduced these changes. It was a central plank of German conservative thinking in the 19th and 20th centuries, at a period when conservatism and nationalism went hand-in-hand. In linguistics, Germanisation also occurs when a word from the German language is adopted into a foreign language. Under the policies of states such as Teutonic Order state (who arrived from the Holy Roman Empire), Austria, the German Empire, and Nazi Germany, non-Germans were often banned from use of their language, the state discriminated their traditions and culture.
Sudeten Germans
German Bohemians and German Moravians (), also known as the Sudeten Germans () in the early 20th century, were ethnic Germans living in the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Margraviate of Moravia (parts of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown) both of which came under jurisdiction of the state of Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after World War I and the subsequent failure to create German Austria. Before 1945, Czechoslovakia was inhabited by over three million such German Bohemians and German Moravians, comprising about 23 percent of the population of the whole republic and about 29.5 percent of the population of Bohemia and Moravia.
1_Apprentice
Sounds interesting. How are you learning the language?