Germanic-speaking world

The Germanic-speaking world[1][2] is the part of the world where Germanic languages are either official, co-official, or significantly used, comprising Germanic-speaking Europe as well as parts of North America, Germanic-speaking Africa, Oceania and Germanic-speaking Asia.

Not to be confused with German speaking world.

Distribution of the Germanic languages in the world
  Countries where the first language of the majority of the population is a Germanic language
  Countries or regions where a Germanic language is an official language but not a primary language
  Countries or regions where a Germanic language has no official status but is notable, i.e. used in some areas of life and/or spoken among a local minority
Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe:
West Germanic languages
  Upper German
  Low German
  Dutch
  Frisian
  English
  Scots
North Germanic languages
  Icelandic
  Faroese
  Norwegian
  Swedish
  Danish
Dots indicate areas where multilingualism is common.

It includes, for example, the English-, German-, Dutch-, Danish-, Swedish- and Norwegian-speaking communities.

Over 200 million Europeans (some 30%) speak a Germanic language natively.[3] Winkler Prins (2002) estimated the number of people who had a Germanic language as their native language worldwide to be around c. 500 million at the time.[4] The majority of these were speakers of English (mostly American English, Commonwealth English, and other varieties) with over 300 million people at the time.[5]

History
Further information: Germania
The Germanic speaking area within the Holy Roman Empire, c. 962, detailing the distribution of Alemannic, Bavarian, Frankish, Saxon, and Frisian.

By the 1st century AD, most of what is today Germanic-speaking Europe was dominated by peoples speaking Germanic languages. These peoples were called Germani by the Romans, and the area they dominated was called Germania. In the preceding centuries, this area had expanded greatly through a series of Germanic expansions. By the 1st century AD, it stretched from the Danube in the south to the North Sea and Baltic Sea in the north, and from the Rhine in the west to beyond the Vistula in the east. The population of this area was however not entirely composed of Germanic peoples. Modern research has determined that much of the area was also inhabited by a non-Germanic indigenous population, who probably spoke a non-Germanic Indo-European language. For this reason, scholars sometimes use the term Germanic-dominated Europe for the region during this time.[lower-alpha 1][lower-alpha 2]

During Late Antiquity, improvements in agricultural methods resulted in a massive population expansion in Germanic Europe.[8] During the Migration Period, the area of Germanic Europe was shifted towards the south and west as a result of a series of Germanic migrations.[9] Most notably, there was the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, which placed this region into the orbit of Germanic Europe.[10]

Speakers

Countries

Independent European countries whose population are predominantly native speakers of a Germanic language:

Countries without officially recognised minority Countries with an officially recognised non-Germanic minority Countries with a Germanic minority

Majority English-speaking countries
Main articles: List of countries by English-speaking population and English-speaking world
English-speaking peoples monument in London

English is the primary natively spoken language in several countries and territories. Five of the largest of these are sometimes described as the "core Anglosphere";[11][12][13] they are the United States of America (with at least 231 million native English speakers),[14] the United Kingdom (60 million),[15][16][17] Canada (19 million),[18] Australia (at least 17 million),[19] and New Zealand (4.8 million).[20] English is also the primary natively spoken language in the Republic of Ireland.[21] English based creoles are spoken by a majority of people in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. English is also spoken by many people as a second language in countries such as Denmark, Malta, and Sweden.[22]

Majority German-speaking countries

Below is a list of countries and one notable region with German language speaking populations.

CountrySpeakersPercentageYear
 Australia79,3530.4%2016[23]
 Austria7,115,78088.6%2001[24]
 Belize9,3642.7%2010[23]
 Belgium76,920[note 1]0.7%2017[25]
 Canada271,8700.7%2016[23]
 Bolivia62,7410.65%2012[26]
 Croatia2,9860.07%2011[23]
 Cyprus1,2940.1%2011[23]
 Czech Republic41,9670.4%2011[27]
 Estonia5220.04%2011[23]
 Finland6,3170.11%2018[28]
 France748,000[note 1]1.2%2012[29]
 Germany69,701,200[note 1]85.2%2010[30]
 Hungary38,2480.4%2011[23]
 Kazakhstan 30,413 0.2% 2009[31]
 Kyrgyzstan7,0630.1%1999[23]
 Latvia2030.01%2000[23]
 Liechtenstein34,43891.5%2015[32]
 Lithuania5280.01%2011[23]
 Luxembourg14,6583.1%2011[33]
 Montenegro1290.02%2011[23]
 Namibia11,1540.5%2011[23]
 New Zealand42,3020.9%2018[34]
 Paraguay 48,812 0.7% 2012[35]
 Poland96,4610.2%2011[36]
 Romania26,5570.1%2011[23]
 Russia44,7570.03%2010[37]
 Serbia2,1900.03%2011[23]
 Slovakia5,1860.09%2011[23]
 Slovenia1,6280.08%2002[23]
 South Africa30,0340.07%1996[23]
 Italy336,8870.6%2014[38][39]
 Spain 192,691[note 1] 0.4% 2016[40]
 Sweden72,0000.73%2016[41]
 Switzerland5,161,64762.8%2016[42]
 United States964,4410.3%2016[43]
 Ukraine 4,206 0.01% 2001[44]
Total (partial) 85,222,201

Subnational territories
TerritoryCountryL1 speakersPercentageYearReference
Uusimaa Finland3,2120.20%2018[28]
South Tyrol Italy336,88765.3%2014[38][39]

See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Linguistic maps of Germanic languages.

Notes
  1. "When we talk of Germanic Europe, therefore, we are really talking about Germanic-dominated Europe, and there is no reason to suppose that the entire population of this truly vast area – some of it militarily subdued in the fairly recent past – was culturally homogeneous in terms of belief systems or social practice, or even that it necessarily spoke the same language.[6]
  2. "In the first century AD, Germanic-speaking groups dominated most of central and northern Europe beyond Rome’s riverine frontiers. The Germani, as the Romans called them, spread all the way from the Rhine in the west (which, before the Roman conquest, had marked an approximate boundary between Europe’s Germanic and Celtic speakers) to beyond the River Vistula in the east, and from the Danube in the south to the North and Baltic Seas... First-century Germania was thus much bigger than modern Germany... With the excision of nationalistic assumptions from the interpretation of literary sources, the history of Germanic-speaking Europe in the Roman period can be rewritten in new and exciting ways... While the territory of ancient Germania was clearly dominated in a political sense by Germanic-speaking groups, it has emerged that the population of this vast territory was far from entirely Germanic... Analysis of river names has shown, however, that there was once in northern Europe a third population group with its own Indo-European language, located between the Celts and the Germani. These people were under the domination of the other two long before Roman commentators reached the area, and we know nothing about them. Much of ancient Germania was also the product of periodic Germanic expansion... But this kind of expansion did not annihilate the indigenous, non-Germanic population of the areas concerned, so it is important to perceive Germania as meaning Germanic-dominated Europe."[7]
  1. Population data by Eurostat, using the source year. "The number of persons having their usual residence in a country on 1 January of the respective year". ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 2018-11-08.

References
  1. "Language and Culture in the Germanic-Speaking World: The History of the Written Word : Public Lecture Given on the Occasion of the Jubilee Symposium at Uppsala University on March 24 Th 1995, at the Faculty of Languages". 1997.
  2. Shaw, Philip A. (2014): Personal names from ethnonyms? Scandinavia and Elsewhere. University of Leicester. Journal contribution. https://hdl.handle.net/2381/29115
  3. https://languageknowledge.eu/
  4. "Germaanse talen". Encarta Encyclopedie Winkler Prins (in Dutch). Microsoft Corporation/Het Spectrum. 1993–2002.
  5. "Engelse taal". Encarta Encyclopedie Winkler Prins (in Dutch). Microsoft Corporation/Het Spectrum. 1993–2002.
  6. Heather 2012, p. 6.
  7. Heather 2007, pp. 52–54.
  8. Heather 2007, p. 87.
  9. Heather 2007, pp. 191–192.
  10. Heather 2012, p. 266, 365.
  11. Mycock, Andrew; Wellings, Ben. "The UK after Brexit: Can and Will the Anglosphere Replace the EU?" (PDF). ...the core Anglosphere states – the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand...
  12. Press, Stanford University (2011). The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations | Srdjan Vucetic. www.sup.org. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804772242.
  13. "Getting Real About the Anglosphere". 17 February 2020. ...from what might be called the "core" Anglosphere nations: Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States;
  14. Ryan 2013, Table 1.
  15. Office for National Statistics 2013, Key Points.
  16. National Records of Scotland 2013.
  17. Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency 2012, Table KS207NI: Main Language.
  18. Statistics Canada 2014.
  19. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2013.
  20. Statistics New Zealand 2014.
  21. "About Ireland - Department of Foreign Affairs".
  22. "English in Europe · English-speaking countries & English language knowledge in Europe".
  23. "Population by language, sex and urban/rural residence". UNdata. Archived from the original on 19 May 2016. Retrieved 13 October 2015.
  24. "Bevölkerung nach Umgangssprache und Staatsangehörigkeit" (PDF). Statistik Oesterreich. May 2001. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2005-05-12. Retrieved 2018-06-06.
  25. "Special Eurobarometer 386: Europeans And Their Languages" (PDF). European Commission. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 January 2016. Retrieved 31 March 2015.
  26. Alemán, ¿lengua extranjera dominante en Bolivia?
  27. "Statistics VDB". vdb.czso.cz. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  28. "Väestö 31.12. muuttujina Maakunta, Kieli, Ikä, Sukupuoli, Vuosi ja Tiedot". Tilastokeskuksen PX-Web tietokannat.
  29. "Eurobarometer 77.1 (Feb–Mar 2012) Robotics, Civil Protection, Humanitarian Aid, Smoking Habits, and Multilingualism". European Commission. February–March 2012 – via GESIS.
  30. Berlin, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (2011-11-09). "KAT38 Occupation, Profession". Adult Education Survey (AES 2010 – Germany). GESIS Data Archive. doi:10.4232/1.10825.
  31. "Results of the 2009 National population census of the Republic of Kazakhstan" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 27 November 2017. Retrieved 27 November 2017.
  32. "Volkszählung 2015 Bevölkerungsstruktur Band 1" (PDF). Liechtensteinische Landesverwaltung. 2015.
  33. résultats, RP 2011-Premiers. "N° 17 La langue principale, celle que l'on maîtrise le mieux" (in French). Retrieved 2018-07-17.
  34. "2018 Census totals by topic – national highlights | Stats NZ". www.stats.govt.nz. Archived from the original on 2019-09-23. Retrieved 2019-09-24.
  35. "Household results of the 2012 Census of Paraguay".
  36. "2011 Population Census, Ethnic Structure" (PDF) (in Polish). 2011. p. 96.
  37. "Население наиболее многочисленных национальностей по родному языку". gks.ru. Retrieved 2018-10-28.
  38. "Südtiroler Sprachbarometer 2014". ASTAT. Retrieved 2 July 2018.
  39. "Statistiche demografiche ISTAT". demo.istat.it. Archived from the original on 2014-10-30. Retrieved 2018-07-17.
  40. "INEbase / Society /Education and culture /Survey on the Involvement of the Adult Population in Learning Activities / Results/ Microdata". www.ine.es. Retrieved 2019-03-14.
  41. "Här är 20 största språken i Sverige". Språktidningen. March 28, 2016.
  42. Statistik, Bundesamt für. "Sprachen und Religionen". www.bfs.admin.ch (in German). Retrieved 2018-07-17.
  43. "Language Spoken at Home by Ability to Speak English for the Population 5 Years and Over". American FactFinder, factfinder.census.gov. U.S. Census Bureau, 2012–2016 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. 2017. Archived from the original on 14 February 2020. Retrieved 4 November 2018.
  44. "Банк даних". database.ukrcensus.gov.ua. Retrieved 2019-03-20.

Sources

Further reading
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