World Language Map

Where is German spoken?

German (Deutsch) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and 23 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where German is spoken

German is spoken in 27 countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and 23 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Germany91%76,548,381
Netherlands71%12,618,404
Austria97%8,698,941
Poland19%7,361,797
Switzerland76%6,734,033
United Kingdom9%6,161,319
France5%3,418,730
Denmark47%2,807,376
Belgium22%2,635,072
Brazil0.8%1,848,437
Hungary18%1,774,035
Czechia15%1,625,685
United States0.5%1,607,226
Kazakhstan6.4%1,296,640
Slovakia22%1,224,003
Finland18%1,012,754
Italy1.6%975,438
Slovenia42%881,114
Bulgaria8%542,613
Greece5%523,055
Canada1.2%465,538
Luxembourg63%422,890
Lithuania14%367,947
Paraguay2.9%218,154
Liechtenstein100%40,272
Romania0.2%38,111
Namibia0.9%25,233

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, German is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks German.

How many people speak German?

Wikidata gives about 76.5 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 58.5 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where German sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies German as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Germanic
  4. Northwest Germanic
  5. West Germanic
  6. High German
  7. Upper German
  8. Middle-Modern High German
  9. Modern High German
  10. Upper Franconian
  11. Global German
  12. German

Related languages

Other languages in the Global German group:

More about German

Codes: ISO 639-3 deu, Glottolog stan1295. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about German

Where is German spoken?

German is spoken in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and 23 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 91% of the population of Germany, which is about 76,548,381 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak German?

Wikidata gives about 76.5 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 58.5 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019).

Which language family is German in?

Glottolog places German in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Germanic, Northwest Germanic, West Germanic, High German, Upper German, Middle-Modern High German, Modern High German, Upper Franconian and Global German.

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