Many German speakers live in these countries

According to Preply’s language experts, approximately 134 million people worldwide speak German. Depending on the estimate, this number varies by several million. The database of the Institute SIL International, which with Ethnologue has the most extensive collection of all languages, amounts to 160 million.

One thing is clear: many more people speak German than live in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. German is one of the 15 most spoken languages ​​in the world. According to Preply, nearly 60 million people say German is their native language. Most of them, of course, in the countries mentioned above, but German is also the official language in Belgium and Luxembourg, and there are large communities where German is spoken in countries such as Namibia and Brazil.

For the following charts, we rely on data from Preply.

In almost 40 countries there are minorities who speak German as their mother tongue, second or third language. Most of them – about 1.2 million – live in France. Alsatian German is one of the languages ​​spoken in France.

There are also more than a million German speakers living in the USAthe Turquoise And Brazil. It is estimated that about 44 million Americans have German ancestry, and about 1.1 million still speak German. In the state of Pennsylvania, some even still speak the German dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch. This is characterized by a mix of different German dialects and English.