Geographical distribution of German speakers
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The German language (both as an official language and as a minority language) is spoken in a number of countries and territories in Central Europe. To cover this speech area they are often referred to as the German speaking countries, the German speaking area, or equivalently German-speaking Europe (the few overseas territories which speak German are not commonly included in the concept).
Together with English-speaking Europe, the Nordic countries and the Dutch-speaking area, German-speaking Europe forms Germanic Europe.
German is the main language of about 90–95 million people in Europe (as of 2004), or 13.3% of all Europeans, being the second most spoken native language in Europe after Russian, above French (66.5 million speakers in 2004) and English (64.2 million speakers in 2004).
The countries with German-speaking majorities are Germany (95%, 78.3 million), Austria (89%, 7.4 million) and Switzerland (64%, 4.6 million) ("D-A-CH"), Luxembourg (0.48 million) and Liechtenstein (0.03 million).