The official language of Germany is German,[2] with over 95 percent of the country speaking Standard German or a dialect of German as their first language.[3] This figure includes speakers of Northern Low Saxon, a recognized minority or regional language that is not considered separately from Standard German in statistics. Recognized minority languages have official status as well, usually in their respective regions.
Language spoken at home
Neither the 1987 West German census nor the 2011 census inquired about language. Starting with the 2017 microcensus (a survey with a sampling fraction of 1% of the persons and households in Germany that supplies basic sociodemographic data and facilitates ongoing monitoring of the labor market), a question asking, "Which language is spoken predominantly in your household?" was added,[4] nearly eighty years since the 1939 Census asked for the mother tongue of the population.[5]
According to a 2020 Pew Research survey, the most commonly spoken languages at home were:[6]
German (90% of households)
Turkish (2% of households)
Arabic (1% of households)
Other (6% of households)
The questionnaire did not distinguish Standard German from German dialects.[7]
German dialects
German dialect area around 1900, defined as all West Germanic varieties using Standard German as their literary language:[8][9][10][11]
The German language area is characterized by a range of different dialects.[12] There is a written and spoken standard language but there are also large differences in the usage of the standard and the local dialects.[12] The flight and expulsion of Germans broke down the isolation of dialect areas. In 1959, 20% of West Germans were expellees or refugees.[13] The colloquial speech is a compromise between Standard German and the dialect.[13]Northern Germany (the Low German area) is characterized by a loss of dialects: standard German is the vernacular, with very few regional features even in informal situations.[12] In Central Germany (the Middle German area) there is a tendency towards dialect loss.[12] In Southern Germany (the Upper German area) dialects are still in use.[12] Dialects are declining in all regions except for Bavaria.[12] In 2008, 45% of Bavarians claimed to use only Bavarian in everyday communication.[14]
At least 81% of the German primary and secondary students were learning English as their first foreign language in 2017.[19] However, German schoolchildren generally do not speak English as proficiently as their Scandinavian counterparts[20] and, in some cases, French or Latin are taught first.[citation needed]
According to a 2020 analysis conducted by Pew Research Center using 2017 data from Eurostat, the most popular non-English foreign languages learned in German primary and secondary schools were French (15%), Spanish (5%) and Russian (1%), with others garnering less than 1% each.[19] During the existence of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, 1949–1990), the most common second language taught there was Russian, while English and French were the preferred second languages taught in schools in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).[21]
Several bilingual kindergartens and schools exist in Germany offering education in German and English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, and other languages.[22]
^W. Heeringa: Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences using Levenshtein Distance. University of Groningen, 2009, pp. 232–234.
^Peter Wiesinger: Die Einteilung der deutschen Dialekte. In: Werner Besch, Ulrich Knoop, Wolfgang Putschke, Herbert Ernst Wiegand (Hrsg.): Dialektologie. Ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung, 2. Halbband. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1983, ISBN 3-11-009571-8, pp. 807–900.
^Werner König: dtv-Atlas Deutsche Sprache. 19. Auflage. dtv, München 2019, ISBN 978-3-423-03025-0, pp. 230.
^C. Giesbers: Dialecten op de grens van twee talen. Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 2008, pp. 233.
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