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Mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries, an estimated 12,000 people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa. [23] Germans settled quite extensively in South Africa, with many Calvinists immigrating from Northern Europe.
German South Africans refers to South Africans who have full or partial German heritage.. A significant number of South Africans are descended from Germans. Most of these originally settled in the Cape Colony, but were absorbed into the Afrikaner and Afrikaans population, because they had religious and ethnic similarities to the Dutch and French.
These countries (with the addition of South Tyrol of Italy) also form the Council for German Orthography and are referred to as the German Sprachraum (German language area). Since 2004, Meetings of German-speaking countries have been held annually with six participants: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland: [1]
German is slowly disappearing elsewhere, but a number of communities still have a large number of speakers and some even have German language schools. Around 17,000 German Nationals lived in South Africa in 2020.
Approximate distribution of native speakers of German or a German variety outside Europe (according to Ethnologue 2016 unless referenced otherwise) Numbers of speakers should not be summed up per country, as they most likely overlap considerably. Table includes varieties with disputed statuses as separate language. Standard German Hunsrik ...
The German-speaking population wished German to be reinstated as an official language and in 1932 the Treaty of Cape Town encouraged South Africa to do so. [3] It was hoped that this would throw a spanner in the works against South Africa annexing South West Africa into the Union of South Africa.
Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch originating from the Afrikaners of South Africa, with over 7.1 million native speakers; [6] Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it [7 ...
German family in Keetmanshoop, 1926. Today, English is the country's sole official language, but about 30,000 Namibians of German descent (around 2% of the country's overall population) and possibly 15,000 black Namibians (many of whom returned from East Germany after Namibian independence) still speak German or Namibian Black German, respectively. [1]