How many people are native German speakers?

The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360-400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers; Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 0.3 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it (at least 5 million in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands); Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe and Scots, both with 1.5 million native speakers; Limburgish varieties with roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border; and the Frisian languages with over 0.5 million native speakers in the Netherlands and Germany.

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa.

The main North Germanic languages are Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers.

The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, all of which are now extinct. The last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken until the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.

The SIL "Ethnologue" lists 48 different living Germanic languages, 41 of which belong to the Western branch and six to the Northern branch; it places Riograndenser Hunsrückisch German in neither of the categories, but it is often considered a German dialect by linguists. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown as some of them, especially the East Germanic languages, disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Some of the West Germanic languages also did not survive past the Migration Period, including Lombardic. As a result of World War II, the German language suffered a significant loss of "Sprachraum", as well as moribundness and extinction of several of its dialects. In the 21st century, its dialects are dying out anyway due to Standard German gaining primacy.

The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic, also known as Common Germanic, which was spoken in about the middle of the 1st millennium BC in Iron Age Scandinavia. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterised by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law. Early varieties of Germanic entered history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of today's northern Germany and southern Denmark.

English is an official language of Belize, Canada, Nigeria, Falkland Islands, Malta, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Philippines, Jamaica, Dominica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, American Samoa, Palau, St. Lucia, Grenada, Barbados, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hong Kong, Pakistan, India, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and former British colonies in Asia, Africa and Oceania. Furthermore, it is the "de facto" language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a recognized language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. American English-speakers make up the majority of all native Germanic speakers, including also making up the bulk of West Germanic speakers.

German is an official language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia and Denmark. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico and Australia. A German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States.

Dutch is an official language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao, the Netherlands, Sint Maarten, and Suriname. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as an official language after Indonesian independence and today it is only used by older or traditionally educated people. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, a partially mutually intelligible daughter language of Dutch.

Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a "lingua franca" of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations, as well.

Low German is a collection of very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany.

Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots).

Frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.

Luxembourgish is a Moselle Franconian dialect that is spoken mainly in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where it is considered to be an official language. Similar varieties of Moselle Franconian are spoken in small parts of Belgium, France, and Germany.

Yiddish, once a native language of some 11 to 13 million people, remains in use by some 1.5 million speakers in Jewish communities around the world, mainly in North America, Europe, Israel, and other regions with Jewish populations.

Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border.

In addition to being the official language in Sweden, Swedish is also spoken natively by the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, which is a large part of the population along the coast of western and southern Finland. Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Swedish is also spoken by some people in Estonia.

Danish is an official language of Denmark and in its overseas territory of the Faroe Islands, and it is a "lingua franca" and language of education in its other overseas territory of Greenland, where it was one of the official languages until 2009. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where it is recognised as a minority language.

Norwegian is the official language of Norway.

Icelandic is the official language of Iceland.

Faroese is the official language of the Faroe Islands, and it is also spoken by some people in Denmark.

All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic, united by subjection to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law. These probably took place during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe from c. 500 BC. Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. 500 BC, and Proto-Norse from the 2nd century AD and later is still quite close to reconstructed Proto-Germanic, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age.

From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three groups: West, East, and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions.

The western group would have formed in the late Jastorf culture, and the eastern group may be derived from the 1st-century variety of Gotland, leaving southern Sweden as the original location of the northern group. The earliest period of Elder Futhark (2nd to 4th centuries) predates the division in regional script variants, and linguistically essentially still reflect the Common Germanic stage. Vimose inscriptions AD 160, are the oldest Germanic writing.

The earliest coherent Germanic text preserved is the 4th-century Gothic translation of the New Testament by Ulfilas. Early testimonies of West Germanic are in Old Frankish/Old Dutch (the 5th-century Bergakker inscription), Old High German (scattered words and sentences 6th century and coherent texts 9th century), and Old English (oldest texts 650, coherent texts 10th century). North Germanic is only attested in scattered runic inscriptions, as Proto-Norse, until it evolves into Old Norse by about 800.

Longer runic inscriptions survive from the 8th and 9th centuries (Eggjum stone, Rök stone), longer texts in the Latin alphabet survive from the 12th century (Íslendingabók), and some skaldic poetry dates back to as early as the 9th century.

By about the 10th century, the varieties had diverged enough to make inter-comprehensibility difficult. The linguistic contact of the Viking settlers of the Danelaw with the Anglo-Saxons left traces in the English language and is suspected to have facilitated the collapse of Old English grammar that resulted in Middle English from the 12th century.

The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration period. The Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically assimilated by their respective neighbors by about the 7th century, with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the 18th century.

During the early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand and by the High German consonant shift on the continent on the other, resulting in Upper German and Low Saxon, with graded intermediate Central German varieties. By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North, and, although both extremes are considered German, they are hardly mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties had completed the second sound shift, while the northern varieties remained unaffected by the consonant shift.

The North Germanic languages, on the other hand, remained unified until well past 1000 AD, and in fact the mainland Scandinavian languages still largely retain mutual intelligibility into modern times. The main split in these languages is between the mainland languages and the island languages to the west, especially Icelandic, which has maintained the grammar of Old Norse virtually unchanged, while the mainland languages have diverged greatly.

Germanic languages possess a number of defining features compared with other Indo-European languages.

Probably the most well-known are the following:

Other significant characteristics are:

Note that some of the above characteristics were not present in Proto-Germanic but developed later as areal features that spread from language to language:

Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward analyticity. Some, such as Icelandic and, to a lesser extent, German, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from Proto-Germanic (and in turn from Proto-Indo-European). Others, such as English, Swedish, and Afrikaans, have moved toward a largely analytic type.

The subgroupings of the Germanic languages are defined by shared innovations. It is important to distinguish innovations from cases of linguistic conservatism. That is, if two languages in a family share a characteristic that is not observed in a third language, that is evidence of common ancestry of the two languages "only if" the characteristic is an innovation compared to the family's proto-language.

The following innovations are common to the Northwest Germanic languages (all but Gothic):

The following innovations are also common to the Northwest Germanic languages but represent areal changes:

The following innovations are common to the West Germanic languages:

The following innovations are common to the Ingvaeonic subgroup of the West Germanic languages, which includes English, Frisian, and in a few cases Dutch and Low German, but not High German:

The following innovations are common to the Anglo-Frisian subgroup of the Ingvaeonic languages:

The oldest Germanic languages all share a number of features, which are assumed to be inherited from Proto-Germanic. Phonologically, it includes the important sound changes known as Grimm's Law and Verner's Law, which introduced a large number of fricatives; late Proto-Indo-European had only one, /s/.

The main vowel developments are the merging (in most circumstances) of long and short /a/ and /o/, producing short /a/ and long /ō/. That likewise affected the diphthongs, with PIE /ai/ and /oi/ merging into /ai/ and PIE /au/ and /ou/ merging into /au/. PIE /ei/ developed into long /ī/. PIE long /ē/ developed into a vowel denoted as /ē/ (often assumed to be phonetically ), while a new, fairly uncommon long vowel /ē/ developed in varied and not completely understood circumstances. Proto-Germanic had no front rounded vowels, but all Germanic languages except for Gothic subsequently developed them through the process of i-umlaut.

Proto-Germanic developed a strong stress accent on the first syllable of the root, but remnants of the original free PIE accent are visible due to Verner's Law, which was sensitive to this accent. That caused a steady erosion of vowels in unstressed syllables. In Proto-Germanic, that had progressed only to the point that absolutely-final short vowels (other than /i/ and /u/) were lost and absolutely-final long vowels were shortened, but all of the early literary languages show a more advanced state of vowel loss. This ultimately resulted in some languages (like Modern English) losing practically all vowels following the main stress and the consequent rise of a very large number of monosyllabic words.

The following table shows the main outcomes of Proto-Germanic vowels and consonants in the various older languages. For vowels, only the outcomes in stressed syllables are shown. Outcomes in unstressed syllables are quite different, vary from language to language and depend on a number of other factors (such as whether the syllable was medial or final, whether the syllable was open or closed and (in some cases) whether the preceding syllable was light or heavy).

Notes:

The oldest Germanic languages have the typical complex inflected morphology of old Indo-European languages, with four or five noun cases; verbs marked for person, number, tense and mood; multiple noun and verb classes; few or no articles; and rather free word order. The old Germanic languages are famous for having only two tenses (present and past), with three PIE past-tense aspects (imperfect, aorist, and perfect/stative) merged into one and no new tenses (future, pluperfect, etc.) developing. There were three moods: indicative, subjunctive (developed from the PIE optative mood) and imperative. Gothic verbs had a number of archaic features inherited from PIE that were lost in the other Germanic languages with few traces, including dual endings, an inflected passive voice (derived from the PIE mediopassive voice), and a class of verbs with reduplication in the past tense (derived from the PIE perfect). The complex tense system of modern English (e.g. "In three months, the house will still be being built" or "If you had not acted so stupidly, we would never have been caught") is almost entirely due to subsequent developments (although paralleled in many of the other Germanic languages).

Among the primary innovations in Proto-Germanic are the preterite present verbs, a special set of verbs whose present tense looks like the past tense of other verbs and which is the origin of most modal verbs in English; a past-tense ending (in the so-called "weak verbs", marked with "-ed" in English) that appears variously as /d/ or /t/, often assumed to be derived from the verb "to do"; and two separate sets of adjective endings, originally corresponding to a distinction between indefinite semantics ("a man", with a combination of PIE adjective and pronoun endings) and definite semantics ("the man", with endings derived from PIE "n"-stem nouns).

Note that most modern Germanic languages have lost most of the inherited inflectional morphology as a result of the steady attrition of unstressed endings triggered by the strong initial stress. (Contrast, for example, the Balto-Slavic languages, which have largely kept the Indo-European pitch accent and consequently preserved much of the inherited morphology.) Icelandic and to a lesser extent modern German best preserve the Proto–Germanic inflectional system, with four noun cases, three genders, and well-marked verbs. English and Afrikaans are at the other extreme, with almost no remaining inflectional morphology.

The following shows a typical masculine "a"-stem noun, Proto-Germanic "*fiskaz" ("fish"), and its development in the various old literary languages:

Originally, adjectives in Proto-Indo-European followed the same declensional classes as nouns. The most common class (the "o/ā" class) used a combination of "o"-stem endings for masculine and neuter genders and "ā"-stems ending for feminine genders, but other common classes (e.g. the "i" class and "u" class) used endings from a single vowel-stem declension for all genders, and various other classes existed that were based on other declensions. A quite different set of "pronominal" endings was used for pronouns, determiners, and words with related semantics (e.g., "all", "only").

An important innovation in Proto-Germanic was the development of two separate sets of adjective endings, originally corresponding to a distinction between indefinite semantics ("a man") and definite semantics ("the man"). The endings of indefinite adjectives were derived from a combination of pronominal endings with one of the common vowel-stem adjective declensions – usually the "o/ā" class (often termed the "a/ō" class in the specific context of the Germanic languages) but sometimes the "i" or "u" classes. Definite adjectives, however, had endings based on "n"-stem nouns. Originally both types of adjectives could be used by themselves, but already by Proto-Germanic times a pattern evolved whereby definite adjectives had to be accompanied by a determiner with definite semantics (e.g., a definite article, demonstrative pronoun, possessive pronoun, or the like), while indefinite adjectives were used in other circumstances (either accompanied by a word with indefinite semantics such as "a", "one", or "some" or unaccompanied).

In the 19th century, the two types of adjectives – indefinite and definite – were respectively termed "strong" and "weak", names which are still commonly used. These names were based on the appearance of the two sets of endings in modern German. In German, the distinctive case endings formerly present on nouns have largely disappeared, with the result that the load of distinguishing one case from another is almost entirely carried by determiners and adjectives. Furthermore, due to regular sound change, the various definite ("n"-stem) adjective endings coalesced to the point where only two endings ("-e" and "-en") remain in modern German to express the sixteen possible inflectional categories of the language (masculine/feminine/neuter/plural crossed with nominative/accusative/dative/genitive – modern German merges all genders in the plural). The indefinite ("a/ō"-stem) adjective endings were less affected by sound change, with six endings remaining ("-, -e, -es, -er, -em, -en"), cleverly distributed in a way that is capable of expressing the various inflectional categories without too much ambiguity. As a result, the definite endings were thought of as too "weak" to carry inflectional meaning and in need of "strengthening" by the presence of an accompanying determiner, while the indefinite endings were viewed as "strong" enough to indicate the inflectional categories even when standing alone. (This view is enhanced by the fact that modern German largely uses weak-ending adjectives when accompanying an indefinite article, and hence the indefinite/definite distinction no longer clearly applies.) By analogy, the terms "strong" and "weak" were extended to the corresponding noun classes, with "a"-stem and "ō"-stem nouns termed "strong" and "n"-stem nouns termed "weak".

However, in Proto-Germanic – and still in Gothic, the most conservative Germanic language – the terms "strong" and "weak" are not clearly appropriate. For one thing, there were a large number of noun declensions. The "a"-stem, "ō"-stem, and "n"-stem declensions were the most common and represented targets into which the other declensions were eventually absorbed, but this process occurred only gradually. Originally the "n"-stem declension was not a single declension but a set of separate declensions (e.g., "-an", "-ōn", "-īn") with related endings, and these endings were in no way any "weaker" than the endings of any other declensions. (For example, among the eight possible inflectional categories of a noun — singular/plural crossed with nominative/accusative/dative/genitive — masculine "an"-stem nouns in Gothic include seven endings, and feminine "ōn"-stem nouns include six endings, meaning there is very little ambiguity of "weakness" in these endings and in fact much less than in the German "strong" endings.) Although it is possible to group the various noun declensions into three basic categories — vowel-stem, "n"-stem, and other-consonant-stem (a.k.a. "minor declensions") — the vowel-stem nouns do not display any sort of unity in their endings that supports grouping them together with each other but separate from the "n"-stem endings.

It is only in later languages that the binary distinction between "strong" and "weak" nouns become more relevant. In Old English, the "n"-stem nouns form a single, clear class, but the masculine "a"-stem and feminine "ō"-stem nouns have little in common with each other, and neither has much similarity to the small class of "u"-stem nouns. Similarly, in Old Norse, the masculine "a"-stem and feminine "ō"-stem nouns have little in common with each other, and the continuations of the masculine "an"-stem and feminine "ōn/īn"-stem nouns are also quite distinct. It is only in Middle Dutch and modern German that the various vowel-stem nouns have merged to the point that a binary strong/weak distinction clearly applies.

As a result, newer grammatical descriptions of the Germanic languages often avoid the terms "strong" and "weak" except in conjunction with German itself, preferring instead to use the terms "indefinite" and "definite" for adjectives and to distinguish nouns by their actual stem class.

In English, both two sets of adjective endings were lost entirely in the late Middle English period.

Note that divisions between and among subfamilies of Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form continuous clines, with adjacent varieties being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not. Within the Germanic language family is East Germanic, West Germanic, and North Germanic. However, East Germanic languages became extinct several centuries ago.

The table below shows the succession of the significant historical stages of each language (horizontally) and their approximate groupings in subfamilies (vertically). Vertical sequence within each group does not imply a measure of greater or lesser similarity.

All living Germanic languages belong either to the West Germanic or to the North Germanic branch.
The West Germanic group is the larger by far, further subdivided into Anglo-Frisian on one hand and Continental West Germanic on the other. Anglo-Frisian notably includes English and all its variants, while Continental West Germanic includes German (standard register and dialects), as well as Dutch (standard register and dialects).

Modern classification looks like this. For a full classification, see List of Germanic languages.The earliest evidence of Germanic languages comes from names recorded in the 1st century by Tacitus (especially from his work "Germania"), but the earliest Germanic writing occurs in a single instance in the 2nd century BC on the Negau helmet.

From roughly the 2nd century AD, certain speakers of early Germanic varieties developed the Elder Futhark, an early form of the runic alphabet. Early runic inscriptions also are largely limited to personal names and difficult to interpret. The Gothic language was written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible in the 4th century. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic varieties began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters. However, throughout the Viking Age, runic alphabets remained in common use in Scandinavia.

In addition to the standard Latin script, many Germanic languages use a variety of accent marks and extra letters, including the ß ("Eszett"), Ĳ, Ø, Æ, Å, Ä, Ü, Ö, Ð, Ȝ, and the Latinized runes Þ and Ƿ (with its Latin counterpart W). In print, German used to be prevalently set in blackletter typefaces (e.g., fraktur or schwabacher) until the 1940s, when "Kurrent" and, since the early 20th century, "Sütterlin" were used for German handwriting.

Yiddish is written using an adapted Hebrew alphabet.

Several of the terms in the table below have had semantic drift. For example, the form "Sterben" and other terms for "die" are cognates with the English word "starve". There is also at least one example of a common borrowing from a non-Germanic source ("ounce" and its cognates from Latin).

Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, roughly 80 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil (mainly in the South Region of the country), Argentina, Canada, South Africa, the post-Soviet states (mainly in Russia and Kazakhstan), and France, each accounting for at least 1 million. Thus, the total number of Germans lies somewhere between 100 and more than 150 million, depending on the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).

Germans

Germans () are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe, who share a common German ancestry, culture and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans.

The English term "Germans" has historically referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Ever since the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, German society has been characterized by a Catholic-Protestant divide.

Today, people from countries with German-speaking majorities (such as Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and other historically-tied countries like Luxembourg) most often subscribe to their own national identities and may or may not also self-identify as ethnically German.

The German term "Deutsche" originates from the Old High German word "diutisc" (from "diot" "people"), referring to the Germanic "language of the people". It is not clear how commonly, if at all, the word was used as an ethnonym in Old High German.

Used as a noun, "ein diutscher" in the sense of "a German" emerges in Middle High German, attested from the second half of the 12th century.

The Old French term "alemans" is taken from the name of the Alamanni. It was loaned into Middle English as "almains" in the early 14th century. The word "Dutch" is attested in English from the 14th century, denoting continental West Germanic ("Dutch" and "German") dialects and their speakers.

While in most Romance languages the Germans have been named from the Alamanni (in what became Swabia) (some, like standard Italian "tedeschi", retain an older borrowing of the endonym, while the Romanian 'germani' stems from the historical correlation with the ancient region of Germania), the Old Norse, Finnish, and Estonian names for the Germans were taken from that of the Saxons. In Slavic languages, the Germans were given the name of " " (singular ""), originally with a meaning "foreigner, one who does not speak [Slavic]".

The English term "Germans" is only attested from the mid-16th century, based on the classical Latin term "Germani" used by Julius Caesar and later Tacitus. It gradually replaced "Dutch" and "Almains", the latter becoming mostly obsolete by the early 18th century.

The Germans are a Germanic people, who as an ethnicity emerged during the Middle Ages. Originally part of the Holy Roman Empire, around 300 independent German states emerged during its decline after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years War. These states eventually formed into modern Germany in the 19th century.

The concept of a German ethnicity is linked to Germanic tribes of antiquity in central Europe. The early Germans originated on the North German Plain as well as southern Scandinavia. By the 2nd century BC, the number of Germans was significantly increasing and they began expanding into eastern Europe and southward into Celtic territory. During antiquity these Germanic tribes remained separate from each other and did not have writing systems at that time.

In the European Iron Age the area that is now Germany was divided into the (Celtic) La Tène horizon in Southern Germany and the (Germanic) Jastorf culture in Northern Germany. By 55 BC, the Germans had reached the Danube river and had either assimilated or otherwise driven out the Celts who had lived there, and had spread west into what is now Belgium and France.

Conflict between the Germanic tribes and the forces of Rome under Julius Caesar forced major Germanic tribes to retreat to the east bank of the Rhine. Roman emperor Augustus in 12 BC ordered the conquest of the Germans, but the catastrophic Roman defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest resulted in the Roman Empire abandoning its plans to completely conquer Germania. Germanic peoples in Roman territory were culturally Romanized, and although much of Germania remained free of direct Roman rule, Rome deeply influenced the development of German society, especially the adoption of Christianity by the Germans who obtained it from the Romans. In Roman-held territories with Germanic populations, the Germanic and Roman peoples intermarried, and Roman, Germanic, and Christian traditions intermingled. The adoption of Christianity would later become a major influence in the development of a common German identity.

The first major public figure to speak of a German people in general, was the Roman figure Tacitus in his work "Germania" around 100 AD. However an actual united German identity and ethnicity did not exist then, and it would take centuries of development of German culture until the concept of a German ethnicity began to become a popular identity.

The Germanic peoples during the Migrations Period came into contact with other peoples; in the case of the populations settling in the territory of modern Germany, they encountered Celts to the south, and Balts and Slavs towards the east. The "Limes Germanicus" was breached in AD 260. Migrating Germanic tribes commingled with the local Gallo-Roman populations in what is now Swabia and Bavaria. The arrival of the Huns in Europe resulted in Hun conquest of large parts of Eastern Europe, the Huns initially were allies of the Roman Empire who fought against Germanic tribes, but later the Huns cooperated with the Germanic tribe of the Ostrogoths, and large numbers of Germans lived within the lands of the Hunnic Empire of Attila. Attila had both Hunnic and Germanic families and prominent Germanic chiefs amongst his close entourage in Europe. The Huns living in Germanic territories in Eastern Europe adopted an East Germanic language as their "lingua franca". A major part of Attila's army were Germans, during the Huns' campaign against the Roman Empire. After Attila's unexpected death the Hunnic Empire collapsed with the Huns disappearing as a people in Europe–who either escaped into Asia or otherwise blended in amongst Europeans.

The migration-period peoples who later coalesced into a "German" ethnicity were the Germanic tribes of the Saxons, Franci, Thuringii, Alamanni and Bavarii. These five tribes, sometimes with inclusion of the Frisians, are considered as the major groups to take part in the formation of the Germans. By the 9th century, the large tribes which lived on the territory of modern Germany had been united under the rule of the Frankish king Charlemagne, known in German as Karl der Große. Much of what is now Eastern Germany became Slavonic-speaking (Sorbs and Veleti), after these areas were vacated by Germanic tribes (Vandals, Lombards, Burgundians and Suebi amongst others) which had migrated into the former areas of the Roman Empire.

A German ethnicity emerged in the course of the Middle Ages, ultimately as a result of the formation of the Kingdom of Germany within East Francia and later the Holy Roman Empire, beginning in the 9th century. The process was gradual and lacked any clear definition, and the use of exonyms designating "the Germans" develops only during the High Middle Ages. The title of "rex teutonicum" "King of the Germans" is first used in the late 11th century, by the chancery of Pope Gregory VII, to describe the future Holy Roman Emperor of the German nation Henry IV. Natively, the term "diutscher" (German) was used for the people of Germany beginning in the 12th century.

After Christianization, the Roman Catholic Church and local rulers led German expansion and settlement in areas inhabited by Slavs and Balts, known as Ostsiedlung. During the wars waged in the Baltic by the Catholic German Teutonic Knights; the lands inhabited by the ethnic group of the Old Prussians (the current reference to the people known then simply as the "Prussians"), were conquered by the Germans. The Old Prussians were an ethnic group related to the Latvian and Lithuanian Baltic peoples. The former German state of Prussia took its name from the Baltic Prussians, although it was led by Germans who had assimilated the Old Prussians; the old Prussian language was extinct by the 17th or early 18th century. The Slavic people of the Teutonic-controlled Baltic were assimilated into German culture and eventually there were many intermarriages of Slavic and German families, including into Prussia's aristocracy known as the Junkers. Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz is a famous German whose surname is of Slavic origin. Massive German settlement led to the assimilation of Baltic (Old Prussians) and Slavic (Wends) populations, who were exhausted by previous warfare.

At the same time, naval innovations led to a German domination of trade in the Baltic Sea and parts of Eastern Europe through the Hanseatic League. Along the trade routes, Hanseatic trade stations became centers of the German culture. German town law "(Stadtrecht)" was promoted by the presence of large, relatively wealthy German populations, their influence and political power. Thus people who would be considered "Germans", with a common culture, language, and worldview different from that of the surrounding rural peoples, colonized trading towns as far north of present-day Germany as Bergen (in Norway), Stockholm (in Sweden), and Vyborg (now in Russia). The Hanseatic League was not exclusively German in any ethnic sense: many towns who joined the league were outside the Holy Roman Empire and a number of them may only loosely be characterized as "German". The Empire itself was not entirely German either. It had a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual structure, some of the smaller ethnicities and languages used at different times were Dutch, Italian, French, Czech and Polish.

By the Middle Ages, large numbers of Jews lived in the Holy Roman Empire and had assimilated into German culture, including many Jews who had previously assimilated into French culture and had spoken a mixed Judeo-French language. Upon assimilating into German culture, the Jewish German peoples incorporated major parts of the German language and elements of other European languages into a mixed language known as Yiddish. However tolerance and assimilation of Jews in German society suddenly ended during the Crusades with many Jews being forcefully expelled from Germany and Western Yiddish disappeared as a language in Germany over the centuries, with German Jewish people fully adopting the German language.

From the late 15th century, the Holy Roman Empire came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. The Thirty Years' War, a series of conflicts fought mainly in the territory of modern Germany, weakened the coherence of the Holy Roman Empire, leading to the emergence of different, smaller German states known as "Kleinstaaterei" in 18th-century Germany.

The Napoleonic Wars were the cause of the final dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, and ultimately the cause for the quest for a German nation state in 19th-century German nationalism. After the Congress of Vienna, Austria and Prussia emerged as two competitors. Austria, trying to remain the dominant power in Central Europe, led the way in the terms of the Congress of Vienna. The Congress of Vienna was essentially conservative, assuring that little would change in Europe and preventing Germany from uniting. These terms came to a sudden halt following the Revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War in 1856, paving the way for German unification in the 1860s. By the 1820s, large numbers of Jewish German women had intermarried with Christian German men and had converted to Christianity. Jewish German Eduard Lasker was a prominent German nationalist figure who promoted the unification of Germany in the mid-19th century.

German nationalism became the sole focus of the German Question which was the question of how Germany was going to be best unified into a nation-state. The idea of unifying all German-speakers into one state was known as the Großdeutsche Lösung ("Greater German solution") which was propagated mostly by the Austrian Empire and the German Austrians. The other option, the Kleindeutsche Lösung ("Lesser German solution") only advocated unifying the northern German states without Austria and the German Austrians was supported predominantly in the Kingdom of Prussia. The idea of including the Austrian Empire into a German nation-state was a problem because it included many non-German ethnic groups, as well as many of the areas it ruled had never been part of Germany and did not want to become part of a German nation-state. In 1866, the feud between Austria and Prussia finally came to a head. In the final battle of the German war ("Battle of Königgrätz") the Prussians successfully defeated the Austrians and succeeded in creating the North German Confederation.

In 1870, after France attacked Prussia, Prussia and its new allies in Southern Germany (among them Bavaria) were victorious in the Franco-Prussian War. It created the German Empire in 1871 as a German nation-state, effectively excluding the multi-ethnic Austrian Habsburg monarchy and Liechtenstein. Integrating the Austrian Germans nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of Germany and Austria, especially among the liberals, the social democrats and also the Catholics who were a minority within the Protestant Germany.

During the 19th century in the German territories, rapid population growth due to lower death rates, combined with poverty, spurred millions of Germans to emigrate, chiefly to the United States. Today, roughly 17% of the United States' population (23% of the white population) is of mainly German ancestry.

The dissolution of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to a strong desire of the population of the new Republic of German Austria to be integrated into Germany or Switzerland. This was, however, prevented by the Treaty of Saint Germain and the Treaty of Versailles. In 1930, three years before the Nazi era, there were roughly 94 million people all over the world claiming German ancestry, or about 4,5% of the world population at the time.

During the Third Reich, the Nazis, led by Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, attempted to unite all the people they claimed were "Germans" ("Volksdeutsche") under the slogan "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" ("One People, One Empire, One Leader"). This policy began in 1938 with Hitler's foreign policy "Heim ins Reich" ("back home to the Reich") which aimed to persuade all Germans living outside of the Reich to return "home" either as individuals or regions to a Greater Germany. During the war, Heinrich Himmler who was issued with the policy of "strengthening of ethnic Germandom" created a Volksliste ("German People's List") which was used to classify all those living in the German occupied territories into different categories according to criteria by Himmler. The policy of uniting all Germans included ethnic Germans in eastern Europe, many of whom had emigrated more than one hundred fifty years before and developed separate cultures in their new lands. This idea was initially welcomed by many ethnic Germans in Sudetenland, Austria, Poland, Danzig and western Lithuania, particularly the Germans from Klaipeda (Memel). The Swiss resisted the idea. They had viewed themselves as a distinctly separate nation since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.

After World War II, eastern European countries such as the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia expelled the Germans from their territories. Many of those had inhabited these lands for centuries, developing a unique culture. Germans were also forced to leave the former eastern territories of Germany, which were annexed by Poland (Silesia, Pomerania, parts of Brandenburg and southern part of East Prussia) and the Soviet Union (northern part of East Prussia). Between 12 and 16,5 million ethnic Germans and German citizens were expelled westwards to allied-occupied Germany.

After World War II, Austrians increasingly saw themselves as a separate nation from the German nation. In 1966, 47% people in Austria viewed themselves as Austrians. In 1990, the number increased to 79%. Recent polls show that no more than 6% of the German-speaking Austrians consider themselves as ""Germans"". An Austrian identity was vastly emphasized along with the ""first-victim of Nazism theory"." Today over 80 percent of the Austrians see themselves as an independent nation.

Before the collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany in 1990, Germans constituted the largest "divided" nation in Europe by far. Between 1950 and 1987, about 1.4 million ethnic Germans and their dependents, mostly from Poland and Romania, arrived in Germany under special provisions of right of return. With the collapse of the Iron Curtain since 1987, 3 million "Aussiedler" – ethnic Germans, mainly from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union – took advantage of Germany's law of return to leave the ""land of their birth"" for Germany.

Approximately 2 million, just from the territories of the former Soviet Union, have resettled in Germany since the late 1980s. On the other hand, significant numbers of ethnic Germans have moved from Germany to other European countries, especially Switzerland, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain and Portugal.

In its "State of World Population 2006" report, the United Nations Population Fund lists Germany with hosting the third-highest percentage of the main international migrants worldwide, about 5% or 10 million of all 191 million migrants.

The native language of Germans is German, a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch, and sharing many similarities with the North Germanic and Scandinavian languages. Spoken by approximately 100 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. German has been replaced by English as the dominant language of science-related Nobel Prize laureates during the second half of the 20th century. It was a lingua franca in the Holy Roman Empire.Global distribution of native speakers of the German language:

People of German origin are found in various places around the globe. United States is home to approximately 50 million German Americans or one third of the German diaspora, making it the largest centre of German-descended people outside Germany. Brazil is the second largest with 5 million people claiming German ancestry. Other significant centres are Canada, Argentina, South Africa and France each accounting for at least 1 million. While the exact number of German-descended people is difficult to calculate, the available data makes it safe to claim the number is exceeding 100 million people.

German literature can be traced back to the Middle Ages, with the most notable authors of the period being Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
The "Nibelungenlied", whose author remains unknown, is also an important work of the epoch, as is the "Thidrekssaga". The fairy tales collections collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 19th century became famous throughout the world.

Theologian Luther, who translated the Bible into German, is widely credited for having set the basis for the modern "High German" language. Among the most admired German poets and authors are Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hoffmann, Brecht, Heine and Schmidt. Nine Germans have won the Nobel Prize in literature: Theodor Mommsen, Paul von Heyse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Nelly Sachs, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Herta Müller.

Germany's influence on philosophy is historically significant and many notable German philosophers have helped shape Western philosophy since the Middle Ages. The rise of the modern natural sciences and the related decline of religion raised a series of questions, which recur throughout German philosophy, concerning the relationships between knowledge and faith, reason and emotion, and scientific, ethical, and artistic ways of seeing the world.
German philosophers have helped shape western philosophy from as early as the Middle Ages (Albertus Magnus). Later, Leibniz (17th century) and most importantly Kant played central roles in the history of philosophy. Kantianism inspired the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as German idealism defended by Fichte and Hegel. Engels helped develop communist theory in the second half of the 19th century while Heidegger and Gadamer pursued the tradition of German philosophy in the 20th century. A number of German intellectuals were also influential in sociology, most notably Adorno, Habermas, Horkheimer, Luhmann, Simmel, Tönnies, and Weber. The University of Berlin founded in 1810 by linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt served as an influential model for a number of modern western universities.

In the 21st century, Germany has been an important country for the development of contemporary analytic philosophy in continental Europe, along with France, Austria, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries.

Germany has been the home of many famous inventors and engineers, such as Johannes Gutenberg, who is credited with the invention of movable type printing in Europe; Hans Geiger, the creator of the Geiger counter; and Konrad Zuse, who built the first electronic computer. German inventors, engineers and industrialists such as Zeppelin, Daimler, Diesel, Otto, Wankel, Von Braun and Benz helped shape modern automotive and air transportation technology including the beginnings of space travel.

The work of David Hilbert, Max Planck and Albert Einstein was crucial to the foundation of modern physics, which Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger developed further. They were preceded by such key physicists as Hermann von Helmholtz, Joseph von Fraunhofer, and Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, among others. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays, an accomplishment that made him the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The Walhalla temple for "laudable and distinguished Germans", features a number of scientists, and is located east of Regensburg, in Bavaria.

In the field of music, Germany claims some of the most renowned classical composers of the world including Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, who marked the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music. Other composers of the Austro-German tradition who achieved international fame include Brahms, Wagner, Haydn, Schubert, Händel, Schumann, Liszt, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Johann Strauss II, Bruckner, Mahler, Telemann, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Orff, and most recently, Henze, Lachenmann, and Stockhausen.

, Germany is the fourth largest music market in the world and has exerted a strong influence on Dance and Rock music, and pioneered trance music. Artists such as Herbert Grönemeyer, Scorpions, Rammstein, Nena, Dieter Bohlen, Tokio Hotel and Modern Talking have enjoyed international fame. German musicians and, particularly, the pioneering bands Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk have also contributed to the development of electronic music. Germany hosts many large rock music festivals annually. The Rock am Ring festival is the largest music festival in Germany, and among the largest in the world. German artists also make up a large percentage of Industrial music acts, which is called Neue Deutsche Härte. Germany hosts some of the largest Goth scenes and festivals in the entire world, with events like Wave-Gothic-Treffen and M'era Luna Festival easily attracting up to 30,000 people. Amongst Germany's famous artists there are
various Dutch entertainers, such as Johannes Heesters.

German cinema dates back to the very early years of the medium with the work of Max Skladanowsky. It was particularly influential during the years of the Weimar Republic with German expressionists such as Robert Wiene and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. The Nazi era produced mostly propaganda films although the work of Leni Riefenstahl still introduced new aesthetics in film. From the 1960s, New German Cinema directors such as Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder placed West-German cinema back onto the international stage with their often provocative films, while the DEFA film studio controlled film production in the GDR.

More recently, films such as "Das Boot" (1981), "The Never Ending Story" (1984) "Run Lola Run" (1998), "Das Experiment" (2001), "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003), "Gegen die Wand (Head-on)" (2004) and "Der Untergang (Downfall)" (2004) have enjoyed international success. In 2002 the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film went to Caroline Link's Nowhere in Africa, in 2007 to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others. The Berlin International Film Festival, held yearly since 1951, is one of the world's foremost film and cinema festivals.

Architectural contributions from Germany include the Carolingian and Ottonian styles, important precursors of Romanesque. The region then produced significant works in styles such as the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque.

The nation was particularly important in the early modern movement through the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus movement identified with Walter Gropius. The Nazis closed these movements and favoured a type of neo-classicism. Since World War II, further important modern and post-modern structures have been built, particularly since the reunification of Berlin.

Roman Catholicism was the sole established religion in the Holy Roman Empire until the Reformation changed this drastically. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the Catholic Church as he saw it as a corruption of Christian faith. Through this, he altered the course of European and world history and established Protestantism. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. The war was fought primarily in what is now Germany, and at various points involved most of the countries of Europe. The war was fought largely as a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire.

According to the latest nationwide census, Roman Catholics constituted 29.5% of the total population of Germany, followed by the Evangelical Protestants at 27.9%. Other Christian denominations, other religions, atheists or not specified constituted 42.6% of the population at the time. Among "others" are Protestants not included in Evangelical Church of Germany, and other Christians such as the Restorationist New Apostolic Church. Protestantism was more common among the citizens of Germany. The North and East Germany is predominantly Protestant, the South and West rather Catholic. Nowadays there is a non-religious majority in Hamburg and the East German states.

Historically, Germany had a substantial Jewish minority. Only a few thousand people of Jewish origin remained in Germany after the Holocaust, but the German Jewish community now has approximately 100,000 members, many from the former Soviet Union. Germany also has a substantial Muslim minority, most of whom are immigrants from Turkey.

German theologians include Luther, Melanchthon, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, and Rudolf Otto. Also Germany brought up many mystics including Meister Eckhart, Rudolf Steiner, Jakob Boehme, and some popes (e.g. Benedict XVI).

Sport forms an integral part of German life, as demonstrated by the fact that 27 million Germans are members of a sports club and an additional twelve million pursue such an activity individually. Football is by far the most popular sport, and the German Football Federation (Deutscher Fußballbund) with more than 6.3 million members is the largest athletic organisation in the country. It also attracts the greatest audience, with hundreds of thousands of spectators attending Bundesliga matches and millions more watching on television.

Other popular sports include handball, volleyball, basketball, ice hockey, and Winter sports. Historically, German sportsmen have been successful contenders in the Olympic Games, ranking third in an all-time Olympic Games medal count, combining East and West German medals. In the 2012 Summer Olympics, Germany finished sixth overall, whereas in the 2010 Winter Olympics Germany finished second.

There are also many Germans in the American NBA. In 2011, Dirk Nowitzki won his first NBA Championship with the Dallas Mavericks by upsetting the Miami Heat. He was also named that year's NBA Finals Most Valuable Player.

Germany is a modern, advanced society, shaped by a plurality of lifestyles and regional identities. The country has established a high level of gender equality, promotes disability rights, and is legally and socially tolerant towards homosexuals. Gays and lesbians can legally adopt their partner's biological children, and civil unions have been permitted since 2001. Former Foreign minister Guido Westerwelle and the former mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, are openly gay.

During the last decade of the 20th century, Germany changed its attitude towards immigrants. Until the mid-1990s the opinion was widespread that Germany is not a country of immigration, even though about 20% of the population were of non-German origin. Today the government and a majority of the German society are acknowledging that immigrants from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds are part of the German society and that controlled immigration should be initiated based on qualification standards.

Since the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the internal and external evaluation of Germany's national image has changed. In the annual Nation Brands Index global survey, Germany became significantly and repeatedly more highly ranked after the tournament. People in 20 different states assessed the country's reputation in terms of culture, politics, exports, its people and its attractiveness to tourists, immigrants and investments. Germany has been named the world's second most valued nation among 50 countries in 2010. Another global opinion poll, for the BBC, revealed that Germany is recognised for the most positive influence in the world in 2010. A majority of 59% have a positive view of the country, while 14% have a negative view.

With an expenditure of €67 billion on international travel in 2008, Germans spent more money on travel than any other country. The most visited destinations were Spain, Italy and Austria.

The event of the Protestant Reformation and the politics that ensued has been cited as the origins of German identity that arose in response to the spread of a common German language and literature. Early German national culture was developed through literary and religious figures including Martin Luther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The concept of a German nation was developed by German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. The popularity of German identity arose in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Persons who speak German as their first language, look German and whose families have lived in Germany for generations are considered "most German", followed by categories of diminishing Germanness such as Aussiedler (people of German ancestry whose families have lived in Eastern Europe but who have returned to Germany), Restdeutsche (people living in lands that have historically belonged to Germany but which is currently outside of Germany), Auswanderer (people whose families have emigrated from Germany and who still speak German), German speakers in German-speaking nations such as Austrians, and finally people of German emigrant background who no longer speak German.

Pan-Germanism's origins began in the early 19th century following the Napoleonic Wars. The wars launched a new movement that was born in France itself during the French Revolution. Nationalism during the 19th century threatened the old aristocratic regimes. Many ethnic groups of Central and Eastern Europe had been divided for centuries, ruled over by the old Monarchies of the Romanovs and the Habsburgs. Germans, for the most part, had been a loose and disunited people since the Reformation when the Holy Roman Empire was shattered into a patchwork of states. The new German nationalists, mostly young reformers such as Johann Tillmann of East Prussia, sought to unite all the German-speaking and ethnic-German (Volksdeutsche) people.

By the 1860s the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire were the two most powerful nations dominated by German-speaking elites. Both sought to expand their influence and territory. The Austrian Empire – like the Holy Roman Empire – was a multi-ethnic state, but German-speaking people there did not have an absolute numerical majority; the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was one result of the growing nationalism of other ethnicities especially the Hungarians in Austrian territory. Prussia under Otto von Bismarck would eventually ride on the coat-tails of nationalism to unite all of modern-day Germany. Following several wars, most notably the German war in 1866 between the two most powerful German states, Austria and Prussia, with the latter being victorious, the German Empire ("Second Reich") was created in 1871 as "Little Germany" without Austria following the proclamation of Wilhelm I as head of a union of German-speaking states, while disregarding millions of its non-German subjects who desired self-determination from German rule.

The creation of the multi-ethnic Austria-Hungary empire created strong ethnic conflict between the different ethnicities of the empire. German nationalism in Austria grew among all social circles of the empire, many wanted to be unified with the German Reich to form a Greater Germany and wanted policies to be carried out to enforce their German ethnic identity rejecting any Austrian pan-ethnic identity. Many German Austrians felt annoyed that they were excluded from the German Empire since it included various non-German ethnic groups. Prominent Austrian pan-Germans such as Georg Ritter von Schönerer created pan-German movements which demanded the annexation of all ethnic German territories. Members of such movements often wore blue cornflowers, known to be the favourite flower of German Emperor William I, in their buttonholes, along with cockades in the German national colours (black, red, and yellow). Both symbols were temporarily banned in Austrian schools. Populists such as the Viennese major Karl Lueger used anti-semitism and pan-Germanism for their own political purposes. Despite Bismarck's victory over Austria in 1866 which ultimately excluded Austria and the German Austrians from the Reich, many Austrian pan-Germans idolized him.

There was also a rejection of Roman Catholicism with the Away from Rome! movement calling for German speakers to identify with Lutheran or Old Catholic churches.

Following the defeat in World War I, influence of German-speaking elites over Central and Eastern Europe was greatly limited. At the Treaty of Versailles Germany was substantially reduced in size. Austria-Hungary was split up. The former German-speaking areas of Austria-Hungary was reduced to a rump state called the "Republic of German-Austria" (German: "Deutschösterreich"). On November 12, the National Assembly declared the rump state a republic and Social Democrat Karl Renner as provisional chancellor. On the same day, it drafted a provisional constitution which stated that "German-Austria is a democratic republic" (Article 1) and "German-Austria is an integral part of the German reich" (Article 2) with the hope of joining Germany. The name "German-Austria" and union with Germany were forbidden by the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Versailles. German-Austria lost the territories of the Sudetenland and German Bohemia to Czechoslovakia, South Tyrol to Italy, and southern Carinthia and Styria to Yugoslavia and the rump state was renamed "Republic of Austria". With these changes, the era of the First Austrian Republic began. These events are sometimes considered to be a pre-"Anschluss" attempt.

During the 1920s, the constitutions of both the First Austrian Republic and the Weimar Republic included the goal of union between the two countries which was supported by all different political parties. In the early 1930s, before the Nazis seized power, popularity for union between Austria and Germany remained strong and the Austrian government looked at the possibility of a customs union with Germany in 1931 but this was stopped by French opposition. In 1933, after Austrian-born Hitler came to power, support for an "Anschluss" grew. The Austrofascism era of Dollfuss/Schuschnigg between 1934-1938 accepted that Austrians were Germans and that Austria was a "German state" but was strongly opposed to Hitler's desire to annex Austria to the Third Reich and wished for Austria to remain independent.

The "Heim ins Reich" initiative (German: literally "Home into the Reich", meaning "Back to Reich", see Reich) was a policy pursued by Nazi Germany which attempted to convince people of German descent living outside of Germany (such as Sudetenland) that they should strive to bring these regions "home" into a greater Germany. This policy began in 1938 on 12 March when Hitler annexed Austria to the Third Reich.

Volga Germans living in the Soviet Union were interned in gulags or forcibly relocated during the Second World War.

World War II brought about the decline of Pan-Germanism, much as World War I had led to the demise of Pan-Slavism. The Germans in Central and Eastern Europe fled and were expelled, parts of Germany itself were devastated, and the country was divided, firstly into Russian, French, American, and British zones and then into West Germany and East Germany.

Germany suffered even larger territorial losses than it did in the First World War, with huge portions of eastern Germany directly annexed by the Soviet Union and Poland. The scale of the Germans' defeat was unprecedented. Nationalism and Pan-Germanism became almost taboo because they had been used so destructively by the Nazis. Indeed, the word "Volksdeutscher" in reference to ethnic Germans naturalized during WWII later developed into a mild epithet.

From the 1960s, Germany also saw increasing immigration, especially from Turkey, under an official programme aimed at encouraging "Gastarbeiter" or guestworkers to the country to provide labour during the post-war economic boom years. Although it had been expected that such workers would return home, many settled in Germany, with their descendants becoming German citizens.

However, German reunification in 1990 revived the old debates. The fear of nationalistic misuse of Pan-Germanism nevertheless remains strong. But the overwhelming majority of Germans today are not chauvinistic in nationalism, but in 2006 and again in 2010, the German National Football Team won third place in the 2006 and 2010 FIFA World Cups, ignited a positive scene of German pride, enhanced by success in sport.
For decades after the Second World War, any national symbol or expression was a taboo. However, the Germans are becoming increasingly patriotic. During a study in 2009, in which some 2,000 German citizens age 14 and upwards filled out a questionnaire, nearly 60% of those surveyed agreed with the sentiment "I'm proud to be German." And 78%, if free to choose their nation, would opt for German nationality with "near or absolute certainty". Another study in 2009, carried out by the Identity Foundation in Düsseldorf, showed that 73% of the Germans were proud of their country, twice more than 8 years earlier. According to Eugen Buss, a sociology professor at the University of Hohenheim, there's an ongoing normalisation and more and more Germans are becoming openly proud of their country.
In the midst of the European sovereign-debt crisis, Radek Sikorski, Poland's Foreign Minister, stated in November 2011, "I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity. You have become Europe's indispensable nation." According to Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at The National Interest, such a statement is unprecedented when taking into consideration Germany's history. "This was an extraordinary statement from a top official of a nation that was ravaged by Germany during World War II. And it reflects a profound shift taking place throughout Germany and Europe about Berlin's position at the center of the Continent." Heilbrunn believes that the adage, "what was good for Germany was bad for the European Union" has been supplanted by a new mentality—what is in the interest of Germany is also in the interest of its neighbors. The evolution in Germany's national identity stems from focusing less on its Nazi past and more on its Prussian history, which many Germans believe was betrayed—and not represented—by Nazism. The evolution is further precipitated by Germany's conspicuous position as Europe's strongest economy. Indeed, this German sphere of influence has been welcomed by the countries that border it, as demonstrated by Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski's effusive praise for his country's western neighbor. This shift in thinking is boosted by a newer generation of Germans who see World War II as a distant memory.

The native language of Germans is German, a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch, and sharing many similarities with the North Germanic and Scandinavian languages. Spoken by approximately 100 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. German has been replaced by English as the dominant language of science-related Nobel Prize laureates during the second half of the 20th century. It was a lingua franca in the Holy Roman Empire.Global distribution of native speakers of the German language:

Germans

Germans () are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe, who share a common German ancestry, culture and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans.

The English term "Germans" has historically referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Ever since the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, German society has been characterized by a Catholic-Protestant divide.

Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, roughly 80 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil (mainly in the South Region of the country), Argentina, Canada, South Africa, the post-Soviet states (mainly in Russia and Kazakhstan), and France, each accounting for at least 1 million. Thus, the total number of Germans lies somewhere between 100 and more than 150 million, depending on the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).

Today, people from countries with German-speaking majorities (such as Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and other historically-tied countries like Luxembourg) most often subscribe to their own national identities and may or may not also self-identify as ethnically German.

The German term "Deutsche" originates from the Old High German word "diutisc" (from "diot" "people"), referring to the Germanic "language of the people". It is not clear how commonly, if at all, the word was used as an ethnonym in Old High German.

Used as a noun, "ein diutscher" in the sense of "a German" emerges in Middle High German, attested from the second half of the 12th century.

The Old French term "alemans" is taken from the name of the Alamanni. It was loaned into Middle English as "almains" in the early 14th century. The word "Dutch" is attested in English from the 14th century, denoting continental West Germanic ("Dutch" and "German") dialects and their speakers.

While in most Romance languages the Germans have been named from the Alamanni (in what became Swabia) (some, like standard Italian "tedeschi", retain an older borrowing of the endonym, while the Romanian 'germani' stems from the historical correlation with the ancient region of Germania), the Old Norse, Finnish, and Estonian names for the Germans were taken from that of the Saxons. In Slavic languages, the Germans were given the name of " " (singular ""), originally with a meaning "foreigner, one who does not speak [Slavic]".

The English term "Germans" is only attested from the mid-16th century, based on the classical Latin term "Germani" used by Julius Caesar and later Tacitus. It gradually replaced "Dutch" and "Almains", the latter becoming mostly obsolete by the early 18th century.

The Germans are a Germanic people, who as an ethnicity emerged during the Middle Ages. Originally part of the Holy Roman Empire, around 300 independent German states emerged during its decline after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years War. These states eventually formed into modern Germany in the 19th century.

The concept of a German ethnicity is linked to Germanic tribes of antiquity in central Europe. The early Germans originated on the North German Plain as well as southern Scandinavia. By the 2nd century BC, the number of Germans was significantly increasing and they began expanding into eastern Europe and southward into Celtic territory. During antiquity these Germanic tribes remained separate from each other and did not have writing systems at that time.

In the European Iron Age the area that is now Germany was divided into the (Celtic) La Tène horizon in Southern Germany and the (Germanic) Jastorf culture in Northern Germany. By 55 BC, the Germans had reached the Danube river and had either assimilated or otherwise driven out the Celts who had lived there, and had spread west into what is now Belgium and France.

The first major public figure to speak of a German people in general, was the Roman figure Tacitus in his work "Germania" around 100 AD. However an actual united German identity and ethnicity did not exist then, and it would take centuries of development of German culture until the concept of a German ethnicity began to become a popular identity.

The migration-period peoples who later coalesced into a "German" ethnicity were the Germanic tribes of the Saxons, Franci, Thuringii, Alamanni and Bavarii. These five tribes, sometimes with inclusion of the Frisians, are considered as the major groups to take part in the formation of the Germans. By the 9th century, the large tribes which lived on the territory of modern Germany had been united under the rule of the Frankish king Charlemagne, known in German as Karl der Große. Much of what is now Eastern Germany became Slavonic-speaking (Sorbs and Veleti), after these areas were vacated by Germanic tribes (Vandals, Lombards, Burgundians and Suebi amongst others) which had migrated into the former areas of the Roman Empire.

A German ethnicity emerged in the course of the Middle Ages, ultimately as a result of the formation of the Kingdom of Germany within East Francia and later the Holy Roman Empire, beginning in the 9th century. The process was gradual and lacked any clear definition, and the use of exonyms designating "the Germans" develops only during the High Middle Ages. The title of "rex teutonicum" "King of the Germans" is first used in the late 11th century, by the chancery of Pope Gregory VII, to describe the future Holy Roman Emperor of the German nation Henry IV. Natively, the term "diutscher" (German) was used for the people of Germany beginning in the 12th century.

By the Middle Ages, large numbers of Jews lived in the Holy Roman Empire and had assimilated into German culture, including many Jews who had previously assimilated into French culture and had spoken a mixed Judeo-French language. Upon assimilating into German culture, the Jewish German peoples incorporated major parts of the German language and elements of other European languages into a mixed language known as Yiddish. However tolerance and assimilation of Jews in German society suddenly ended during the Crusades with many Jews being forcefully expelled from Germany and Western Yiddish disappeared as a language in Germany over the centuries, with German Jewish people fully adopting the German language.

From the late 15th century, the Holy Roman Empire came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. The Thirty Years' War, a series of conflicts fought mainly in the territory of modern Germany, weakened the coherence of the Holy Roman Empire, leading to the emergence of different, smaller German states known as "Kleinstaaterei" in 18th-century Germany.

In 1870, after France attacked Prussia, Prussia and its new allies in Southern Germany (among them Bavaria) were victorious in the Franco-Prussian War. It created the German Empire in 1871 as a German nation-state, effectively excluding the multi-ethnic Austrian Habsburg monarchy and Liechtenstein. Integrating the Austrian Germans nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of Germany and Austria, especially among the liberals, the social democrats and also the Catholics who were a minority within the Protestant Germany.

During the 19th century in the German territories, rapid population growth due to lower death rates, combined with poverty, spurred millions of Germans to emigrate, chiefly to the United States. Today, roughly 17% of the United States' population (23% of the white population) is of mainly German ancestry.

The dissolution of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to a strong desire of the population of the new Republic of German Austria to be integrated into Germany or Switzerland. This was, however, prevented by the Treaty of Saint Germain and the Treaty of Versailles. In 1930, three years before the Nazi era, there were roughly 94 million people all over the world claiming German ancestry, or about 4,5% of the world population at the time.

After World War II, eastern European countries such as the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia expelled the Germans from their territories. Many of those had inhabited these lands for centuries, developing a unique culture. Germans were also forced to leave the former eastern territories of Germany, which were annexed by Poland (Silesia, Pomerania, parts of Brandenburg and southern part of East Prussia) and the Soviet Union (northern part of East Prussia). Between 12 and 16,5 million ethnic Germans and German citizens were expelled westwards to allied-occupied Germany.

After World War II, Austrians increasingly saw themselves as a separate nation from the German nation. In 1966, 47% people in Austria viewed themselves as Austrians. In 1990, the number increased to 79%. Recent polls show that no more than 6% of the German-speaking Austrians consider themselves as ""Germans"". An Austrian identity was vastly emphasized along with the ""first-victim of Nazism theory"." Today over 80 percent of the Austrians see themselves as an independent nation.

Before the collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany in 1990, Germans constituted the largest "divided" nation in Europe by far. Between 1950 and 1987, about 1.4 million ethnic Germans and their dependents, mostly from Poland and Romania, arrived in Germany under special provisions of right of return. With the collapse of the Iron Curtain since 1987, 3 million "Aussiedler" – ethnic Germans, mainly from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union – took advantage of Germany's law of return to leave the ""land of their birth"" for Germany.

Approximately 2 million, just from the territories of the former Soviet Union, have resettled in Germany since the late 1980s. On the other hand, significant numbers of ethnic Germans have moved from Germany to other European countries, especially Switzerland, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain and Portugal.

In its "State of World Population 2006" report, the United Nations Population Fund lists Germany with hosting the third-highest percentage of the main international migrants worldwide, about 5% or 10 million of all 191 million migrants.

The native language of Germans is German, a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch, and sharing many similarities with the North Germanic and Scandinavian languages. Spoken by approximately 100 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. German has been replaced by English as the dominant language of science-related Nobel Prize laureates during the second half of the 20th century. It was a lingua franca in the Holy Roman Empire.Global distribution of native speakers of the German language:

People of German origin are found in various places around the globe. United States is home to approximately 50 million German Americans or one third of the German diaspora, making it the largest centre of German-descended people outside Germany. Brazil is the second largest with 5 million people claiming German ancestry. Other significant centres are Canada, Argentina, South Africa and France each accounting for at least 1 million. While the exact number of German-descended people is difficult to calculate, the available data makes it safe to claim the number is exceeding 100 million people.

German literature can be traced back to the Middle Ages, with the most notable authors of the period being Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
The "Nibelungenlied", whose author remains unknown, is also an important work of the epoch, as is the "Thidrekssaga". The fairy tales collections collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 19th century became famous throughout the world.

Theologian Luther, who translated the Bible into German, is widely credited for having set the basis for the modern "High German" language. Among the most admired German poets and authors are Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hoffmann, Brecht, Heine and Schmidt. Nine Germans have won the Nobel Prize in literature: Theodor Mommsen, Paul von Heyse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Nelly Sachs, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Herta Müller.

In the 21st century, Germany has been an important country for the development of contemporary analytic philosophy in continental Europe, along with France, Austria, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries.

Germany has been the home of many famous inventors and engineers, such as Johannes Gutenberg, who is credited with the invention of movable type printing in Europe; Hans Geiger, the creator of the Geiger counter; and Konrad Zuse, who built the first electronic computer. German inventors, engineers and industrialists such as Zeppelin, Daimler, Diesel, Otto, Wankel, Von Braun and Benz helped shape modern automotive and air transportation technology including the beginnings of space travel.

The work of David Hilbert, Max Planck and Albert Einstein was crucial to the foundation of modern physics, which Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger developed further. They were preceded by such key physicists as Hermann von Helmholtz, Joseph von Fraunhofer, and Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, among others. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays, an accomplishment that made him the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The Walhalla temple for "laudable and distinguished Germans", features a number of scientists, and is located east of Regensburg, in Bavaria.

In the field of music, Germany claims some of the most renowned classical composers of the world including Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, who marked the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music. Other composers of the Austro-German tradition who achieved international fame include Brahms, Wagner, Haydn, Schubert, Händel, Schumann, Liszt, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Johann Strauss II, Bruckner, Mahler, Telemann, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Orff, and most recently, Henze, Lachenmann, and Stockhausen.

German cinema dates back to the very early years of the medium with the work of Max Skladanowsky. It was particularly influential during the years of the Weimar Republic with German expressionists such as Robert Wiene and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. The Nazi era produced mostly propaganda films although the work of Leni Riefenstahl still introduced new aesthetics in film. From the 1960s, New German Cinema directors such as Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder placed West-German cinema back onto the international stage with their often provocative films, while the DEFA film studio controlled film production in the GDR.

More recently, films such as "Das Boot" (1981), "The Never Ending Story" (1984) "Run Lola Run" (1998), "Das Experiment" (2001), "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003), "Gegen die Wand (Head-on)" (2004) and "Der Untergang (Downfall)" (2004) have enjoyed international success. In 2002 the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film went to Caroline Link's Nowhere in Africa, in 2007 to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others. The Berlin International Film Festival, held yearly since 1951, is one of the world's foremost film and cinema festivals.

Architectural contributions from Germany include the Carolingian and Ottonian styles, important precursors of Romanesque. The region then produced significant works in styles such as the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque.

The nation was particularly important in the early modern movement through the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus movement identified with Walter Gropius. The Nazis closed these movements and favoured a type of neo-classicism. Since World War II, further important modern and post-modern structures have been built, particularly since the reunification of Berlin.

Roman Catholicism was the sole established religion in the Holy Roman Empire until the Reformation changed this drastically. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the Catholic Church as he saw it as a corruption of Christian faith. Through this, he altered the course of European and world history and established Protestantism. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. The war was fought primarily in what is now Germany, and at various points involved most of the countries of Europe. The war was fought largely as a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire.

According to the latest nationwide census, Roman Catholics constituted 29.5% of the total population of Germany, followed by the Evangelical Protestants at 27.9%. Other Christian denominations, other religions, atheists or not specified constituted 42.6% of the population at the time. Among "others" are Protestants not included in Evangelical Church of Germany, and other Christians such as the Restorationist New Apostolic Church. Protestantism was more common among the citizens of Germany. The North and East Germany is predominantly Protestant, the South and West rather Catholic. Nowadays there is a non-religious majority in Hamburg and the East German states.

Historically, Germany had a substantial Jewish minority. Only a few thousand people of Jewish origin remained in Germany after the Holocaust, but the German Jewish community now has approximately 100,000 members, many from the former Soviet Union. Germany also has a substantial Muslim minority, most of whom are immigrants from Turkey.

German theologians include Luther, Melanchthon, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, and Rudolf Otto. Also Germany brought up many mystics including Meister Eckhart, Rudolf Steiner, Jakob Boehme, and some popes (e.g. Benedict XVI).

Sport forms an integral part of German life, as demonstrated by the fact that 27 million Germans are members of a sports club and an additional twelve million pursue such an activity individually. Football is by far the most popular sport, and the German Football Federation (Deutscher Fußballbund) with more than 6.3 million members is the largest athletic organisation in the country. It also attracts the greatest audience, with hundreds of thousands of spectators attending Bundesliga matches and millions more watching on television.

Other popular sports include handball, volleyball, basketball, ice hockey, and Winter sports. Historically, German sportsmen have been successful contenders in the Olympic Games, ranking third in an all-time Olympic Games medal count, combining East and West German medals. In the 2012 Summer Olympics, Germany finished sixth overall, whereas in the 2010 Winter Olympics Germany finished second.

There are also many Germans in the American NBA. In 2011, Dirk Nowitzki won his first NBA Championship with the Dallas Mavericks by upsetting the Miami Heat. He was also named that year's NBA Finals Most Valuable Player.

Germany is a modern, advanced society, shaped by a plurality of lifestyles and regional identities. The country has established a high level of gender equality, promotes disability rights, and is legally and socially tolerant towards homosexuals. Gays and lesbians can legally adopt their partner's biological children, and civil unions have been permitted since 2001. Former Foreign minister Guido Westerwelle and the former mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, are openly gay.

During the last decade of the 20th century, Germany changed its attitude towards immigrants. Until the mid-1990s the opinion was widespread that Germany is not a country of immigration, even though about 20% of the population were of non-German origin. Today the government and a majority of the German society are acknowledging that immigrants from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds are part of the German society and that controlled immigration should be initiated based on qualification standards.

Since the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the internal and external evaluation of Germany's national image has changed. In the annual Nation Brands Index global survey, Germany became significantly and repeatedly more highly ranked after the tournament. People in 20 different states assessed the country's reputation in terms of culture, politics, exports, its people and its attractiveness to tourists, immigrants and investments. Germany has been named the world's second most valued nation among 50 countries in 2010. Another global opinion poll, for the BBC, revealed that Germany is recognised for the most positive influence in the world in 2010. A majority of 59% have a positive view of the country, while 14% have a negative view.

With an expenditure of €67 billion on international travel in 2008, Germans spent more money on travel than any other country. The most visited destinations were Spain, Italy and Austria.

The event of the Protestant Reformation and the politics that ensued has been cited as the origins of German identity that arose in response to the spread of a common German language and literature. Early German national culture was developed through literary and religious figures including Martin Luther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The concept of a German nation was developed by German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. The popularity of German identity arose in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Persons who speak German as their first language, look German and whose families have lived in Germany for generations are considered "most German", followed by categories of diminishing Germanness such as Aussiedler (people of German ancestry whose families have lived in Eastern Europe but who have returned to Germany), Restdeutsche (people living in lands that have historically belonged to Germany but which is currently outside of Germany), Auswanderer (people whose families have emigrated from Germany and who still speak German), German speakers in German-speaking nations such as Austrians, and finally people of German emigrant background who no longer speak German.

Pan-Germanism's origins began in the early 19th century following the Napoleonic Wars. The wars launched a new movement that was born in France itself during the French Revolution. Nationalism during the 19th century threatened the old aristocratic regimes. Many ethnic groups of Central and Eastern Europe had been divided for centuries, ruled over by the old Monarchies of the Romanovs and the Habsburgs. Germans, for the most part, had been a loose and disunited people since the Reformation when the Holy Roman Empire was shattered into a patchwork of states. The new German nationalists, mostly young reformers such as Johann Tillmann of East Prussia, sought to unite all the German-speaking and ethnic-German (Volksdeutsche) people.

There was also a rejection of Roman Catholicism with the Away from Rome! movement calling for German speakers to identify with Lutheran or Old Catholic churches.

During the 1920s, the constitutions of both the First Austrian Republic and the Weimar Republic included the goal of union between the two countries which was supported by all different political parties. In the early 1930s, before the Nazis seized power, popularity for union between Austria and Germany remained strong and the Austrian government looked at the possibility of a customs union with Germany in 1931 but this was stopped by French opposition. In 1933, after Austrian-born Hitler came to power, support for an "Anschluss" grew. The Austrofascism era of Dollfuss/Schuschnigg between 1934-1938 accepted that Austrians were Germans and that Austria was a "German state" but was strongly opposed to Hitler's desire to annex Austria to the Third Reich and wished for Austria to remain independent.

The "Heim ins Reich" initiative (German: literally "Home into the Reich", meaning "Back to Reich", see Reich) was a policy pursued by Nazi Germany which attempted to convince people of German descent living outside of Germany (such as Sudetenland) that they should strive to bring these regions "home" into a greater Germany. This policy began in 1938 on 12 March when Hitler annexed Austria to the Third Reich.

Volga Germans living in the Soviet Union were interned in gulags or forcibly relocated during the Second World War.

World War II brought about the decline of Pan-Germanism, much as World War I had led to the demise of Pan-Slavism. The Germans in Central and Eastern Europe fled and were expelled, parts of Germany itself were devastated, and the country was divided, firstly into Russian, French, American, and British zones and then into West Germany and East Germany.

Germany suffered even larger territorial losses than it did in the First World War, with huge portions of eastern Germany directly annexed by the Soviet Union and Poland. The scale of the Germans' defeat was unprecedented. Nationalism and Pan-Germanism became almost taboo because they had been used so destructively by the Nazis. Indeed, the word "Volksdeutscher" in reference to ethnic Germans naturalized during WWII later developed into a mild epithet.

From the 1960s, Germany also saw increasing immigration, especially from Turkey, under an official programme aimed at encouraging "Gastarbeiter" or guestworkers to the country to provide labour during the post-war economic boom years. Although it had been expected that such workers would return home, many settled in Germany, with their descendants becoming German citizens.

Around the world, German has approximately 100 million native speakers and also about 80 million non-native speakers. German is the main language of about 90 million people (18%) in the EU. 67% of German citizens claim to be able to communicate in at least one foreign language, 27% in at least two languages other than their first.

Culture of Germany

German culture has spanned the entire German-speaking world. From its roots, culture in Germany has been shaped by major intellectual and popular currents in Europe, both religious and secular. Historically, Germany has been called "Das Land der Dichter und Denker" (the country of poets and thinkers).

There are a number of public holidays in Germany. The country is particularly known for its traditional Oktoberfest celebrations in Munich, its carnival culture and globally influential Christmas customs known as Weihnachten. 3 October has been the national day of Germany since 1990, celebrated as the German Unity Day ("Tag der Deutschen Einheit"). The UNESCO inscribed 38 properties in Germany on the World Heritage List.

Germany was the world's second most respected nation among 50 countries in 2013. A global opinion poll for the BBC revealed that Germany is recognized for having the most positive influence in the world in 2011, 2013, and 2014.

German is the official and predominant spoken language in Germany. It is one of 23 official languages in the European Union, and one of the three working languages of the European Commission, along with English and French. Recognised native minority languages in Germany are Danish, Sorbian,
North Frisian and
Saterland Frisian. They are officially protected by the ECRML. The most used immigrant languages are Turkish, Kurdish, Polish, the Balkan languages, and Russian.

Standard German is a West Germanic language and is closely related to and classified alongside English, Dutch, and the Frisian languages. To a lesser extent, it is also related to the East (extinct) and North Germanic languages. Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Significant minorities of words are derived from Latin and Greek, with a smaller amount from French and most recently English (known as Denglisch). German is written using the Latin alphabet. In addition to the 26 standard letters, German has three vowels with Umlaut, namely ä, ö, and ü, as well as the Eszett or "scharfes S" ("sharp s") which is written "ß". German orthography has gone through a series of reforms, the most recent in 1996.

German dialects are distinguished from varieties of standard German. German dialects are traditional local varieties and can be traced back to the different German tribes. Many of them are not easily understandable to a speaker of standard German, since they often differ in lexicon, phonology, and syntax.

In the German diaspora, aspects of German culture are passed on to younger generations through naming customs and through the use of spoken and written German. The Goethe Institute seeks the spread the knowledge of German culture worldwide.

German literature can be traced back to the Middle Ages, with the most notable authors of the period being Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
The "Nibelungenlied", whose author remains unknown, is also an important work of the epoch, as is the "Thidrekssaga". The fairy tales collections collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 19th century became famous throughout the world.

Theologian Luther, who translated the Bible into German, is widely credited for having set the basis for the modern "High German" language. Among the most admired German poets and authors are Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hoffmann, Brecht, Heine and Schmidt. Nine Germans have won the Nobel Prize in literature: Theodor Mommsen, Paul von Heyse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Nelly Sachs, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Herta Müller.

The rise of the modern natural sciences and the related decline of religion raised a series of questions, which recur throughout German philosophy, concerning the relationships between knowledge and faith, reason and emotion, and scientific, ethical, and artistic ways of seeing the world.

German philosophers have helped shape western philosophy from as early as the Middle Ages (Albertus Magnus). Later, Leibniz (17th century) and most importantly Kant played central roles in the history of philosophy. Kantianism inspired the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as German idealism defended by Fichte and Hegel. Marx and Engels developed communist theory in the second half of the 19th century while Heidegger and Gadamer pursued the tradition of German philosophy in the 20th century. A number of German intellectuals were also influential in sociology, most notably Adorno, Elias, Habermas, Horkheimer, Luhmann, Marcuse, Simmel, Tönnies, and Weber. The University of Berlin founded in 1810 by linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt served as an influential model for a number of modern western universities.

In the 21st century Germany has been an important country for the development of contemporary analytic philosophy in continental Europe, along with France, Austria, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries.

In the field of music, Germany claims some of the most renowned classical composers of the world, including Bach and Beethoven, who marked the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music. Other composers of the Austro-German tradition who achieved international fame include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, Haydn, Schubert, Händel, Schumann, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Johann Strauss II, Bruckner, Mahler, Telemann, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Orff, and most recently, Henze, Lachenmann, and Stockhausen.

Germany is the largest music market in Europe, and third largest in the world. It has exerted a strong influence on techno and rock music, and pioneered trance music. Artists such as Herbert Grönemeyer, Scorpions, Blind Guardian, Rammstein, Nena, Xavier Naidoo, Tokio Hotel and Modern Talking have enjoyed international fame. German musicians, and particularly the pioneering bands Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, have also contributed to the development of electronic music.

German popular music of the 20th and 21st centuries includes the movements of Neue Deutsche Welle (Nena, Alphaville), Ostrock (City, Keimzeit), Metal/Rock, Punk (Nina Hagen, Böhse Onkelz, Die Ärzte, Die Toten Hosen), Pop rock (Beatsteaks), Indie (Tocotronic, Blumfeld) and Hip Hop (Die Fantastischen Vier, Deichkind). A global trendsetter is the German Minimal and Techno scene (e.g. Ricardo Villalobos, Paul Kalkbrenner and Sven Vath).

Germany hosts many large rock music festivals every year. The Rock am Ring festival is the largest music festival in Germany, and among the largest in the world. German artists also make up a large percentage of Industrial music acts, which is called Neue Deutsche Härte. Germany hosts some of the largest Goth scenes and festivals in the entire world, with events like Wave-Gotik-Treffen and M'era Luna Festival attracting up to 30,000 people. In addition, the country hosts Wacken Open Air, the biggest heavy metal open air festival in the world.

Since about 1970, Germany has once again had a thriving popular culture, now increasingly led by its reinstated capital Berlin, and a self-confident music and art scene. Germany is also very well known for its many renowned opera houses, such as Semperoper, Komische Oper Berlin and Munich State Theatre. Richard Wagner established the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

One of the most famous composers of the international film business is Hans Zimmer.

German cinema dates back to the very early years of the medium with the work of Max Skladanowsky. It was particularly influential during the years of the Weimar Republic with German expressionists such as Robert Wiene and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Austrian-based director Fritz Lang, who became a German citizen in 1926 and whose career flourished in the pre-war German film industry, is said to have been a major influence on Hollywood cinema. His silent movie Metropolis (1927) is referred to as the birth of modern Science Fiction movies.
Founded in 1912, the Babelsberg Film Studio is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.

In 1930, Josef von Sternberg directed "The Blue Angel", which was the first major German sound film and it brought world fame to actress Marlene Dietrich. Impressionist documentary, directed by Walter Ruttmann, is a prominent example of the city symphony genre. The Nazi era produced mostly propaganda films although the work of Leni Riefenstahl still introduced new aesthetics to film.

During the 1970s and 1980s, New German Cinema directors such as Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder put West German cinema back on the international stage with their often provocative films.

More recently, films such as "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003), "Gegen die Wand (Head-on)" (2004), "Der Untergang (Downfall)" (2004), and "Der Baader Meinhof Komplex" (2008) have enjoyed international success.

The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film went to the German production "Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum)" in 1979, to "Nowhere in Africa" in 2002, and to "Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)" in 2007. Among the most famous German actors are Marlene Dietrich, Klaus Kinski, Hanna Schygulla, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Jürgen Prochnow, Thomas Kretschmann, Til Schweiger and Daniel Brühl.

The Berlin Film Festival, held annually since 1951, is one of the world's foremost film festivals. An international jury places emphasis on representing films from all over the world and awards the winners with the Golden and Silver Bears. The annual European Film Awards ceremony is held every second year in the city of Berlin, where the European Film Academy (EFA) is located. The Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam are the oldest large-scale film studios in the world and a centre for international film production.

Germany's television market is the largest in Europe, with 34,000,000 TV households.
The many regional and national public broadcasters are organised in line with the federal political structure. Around 90% of German households have cable or satellite TV, and viewers can choose from a variety of free-to-view public and commercial channels. Pay-TV services have not become popular or successful while public TV broadcasters ZDF and ARD offer a range of digital-only channels.

Germany is home to some of the world's largest media conglomerates, including Bertelsmann, the Axel Springer AG and ProSiebenSat.1 Media.

The German-speaking book publishers produce about 700,000,000 copies of books every year, with about 80,000 titles, nearly 60,000 of them new publications. Germany is in third place on international statistics after the English-speaking book market and the People’s Republic of China. The Frankfurt Book Fair is considered to be the most important book fair in the world for international deals and trading and has a tradition that spans over 500 years.

Many of Europe's best-selling newspapers and magazines are produced in Germany. The papers with the highest circulation are "Die Zeit", "Süddeutsche Zeitung", "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" and "Die Welt", the largest magazines include "Der Spiegel", "Stern" and "Focus". The "Bild" is a tabloid and has the largest circulation of all German papers.

Architectural contributions from Germany include the Carolingian and Ottonian styles, important precursors of Romanesque. The region has also produced significant works in styles such as the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque.

The nation was particularly important in the early modern movement through the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus movement identified with Walter Gropius. The Nazis closed these movements and favoured a type of neo-classicism. Since World War II post-modern structures have been built. Since the reunification of Germany the trend has continued.

German art has a long and distinguished tradition in the visual arts, from the earliest known work of figurative art to its current output of contemporary art.

Important German Renaissance painters include Albrecht Altdorfer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Matthias Grünewald, Hans Holbein the Younger and the well-known Albrecht Dürer. The most important Baroque artists from Germany are Cosmas Damian Asam. Further artists are the painter Anselm Kiefer, romantic Caspar David Friedrich, the surrealist Max Ernst, the conceptualist Joseph Beuys, or Wolf Vostell or the neo-expressionist Georg Baselitz.

Within modern day society, contemporary art is a large aspect of the culture. This large community draws in people from all around the world. There are around 500 galleries in Germany that caters to this modern form of art. Art Cologne is a popular fair that displays contemporary art.

59.4% of the German population belongs to Christian denominations: 30% are Roman Catholic, and 29% are affiliated with Protestantism (the figures are known accurately because Germany imposes a church tax on those who disclose a religious affiliation).

The north and east are predominantly Protestant, the south and west predominantly Catholic. Nowadays there is a non-religious majority in Hamburg and the former East German states. Germany was, at one point, almost in its entirety within the Roman Catholic Holy Roman Empire, but was also the source of Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther. During the Kulturkampf (from about 1872 to 1886) the government opposed the Catholic church.

Historically, Germany had a substantial Jewish population. Only a few thousand people of Jewish origin remained in Germany after the Holocaust, but the German Jewish community now has about 100,000 members, many from the former Soviet Union. Germany also has a substantial Muslim minority, most of whom are from Turkey.

German theologians include Luther, Melanchthon, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, and Rudolf Otto. Germany was also the origin of many mystics, including Meister Eckhart, Rudolf Steiner, and Jakob Boehme; and of Pope Benedict XVI.

Germany has been the home of many famous inventors and engineers, such as Johannes Gutenberg, who is credited with the invention of movable type printing in Europe; Hans Geiger, the creator of the Geiger counter; and Konrad Zuse, who built the first computer. German inventors, engineers and industrialists such as Zeppelin, Daimler, Diesel, Otto, Wankel, von Braun and Benz helped shape modern automotive and air transportation technology including the beginnings of space travel.

The work of Albert Einstein and Max Planck was crucial to the foundation of modern physics, which Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger developed further. They were preceded by such key physicists as Hermann von Helmholtz, Joseph von Fraunhofer, and Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, among others. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays, an accomplishment that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The Walhalla temple for "laudable and distinguished Germans" features a number of scientists, and is located east of Regensburg, in Bavaria.

Germany is home to some of the finest academic centers in Europe. Some famous universities are those of Munich and Berlin, University of Tübingen, University of Göttingen, University of Marburg, University of Berlin, Mining Academy Freiberg and Freiburg University, among many others. Moreover, the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg is one of the oldest universities in Europe.

German designers were leaders of modern product design, with the Bauhaus designers like Mies van der Rohe, and Dieter Rams of Braun being essential.

Germany is a leading country in the fashion industry. The German textile industry consisted of about 1,300 companies with more than 130,000 employees in 2010, which generated a revenue of 28 billion Euro. Almost 44 percent of the products are exported. The textile branch thus is the second largest producer of consumer goods after food production in the country. Berlin is the center of young and creative fashion in Germany, prominently displayed at Berlin Fashion Week (twice a year). It also hosts Europe's largest fashion trade fair called Bread & Butter.

Munich, Hamburg and Düsseldorf are also important design and production hubs of the German fashion industry, among smaller towns. Renowned fashion designers from Germany include Karl Lagerfeld, Jil Sander, Wolfgang Joop, Philipp Plein and Michael Michalsky. Important brands include Hugo Boss, Escada and Triumph, as well as special outfitters like Adidas, PUMA and Jack Wolfskin. The German supermodels Claudia Schiffer, Heidi Klum, Tatjana Patitz and Nadja Auermann came to global fame.

German cuisine varies from region to region. The southern regions of Bavaria and Swabia, for instance, share a culinary culture with Switzerland and Austria. Pork, beef, and poultry are the main varieties of meat consumed in Germany; pork is the most popular. Throughout all regions, meat is often eaten in sausage form. More than 1500 different types of sausage are produced in Germany. Organic food has gained a market share of around 3.0%, and this is predicted to increase further.

A popular German saying has the meaning: "Breakfast like an emperor, lunch like a king, and dine like a beggar." Breakfast is usually a selection of breads and rolls with jam and honey or cold cuts and cheese, sometimes accompanied by a boiled egg. Cereals or muesli with milk or yoghurt is less common but widespread. More than 300 types of bread are sold in bakery shops across the country. Occasionally, more traditional and heartier Breakfasts, like the Bavarian "Brotzeit" with Weisswurst, Sweet Mustard and Wheat beer, or the Bauernfrühstück are also popular.

As a country with many immigrants, Germany has adopted many international dishes into its cuisine and daily eating habits. Italian dishes like pizza and pasta, Turkish and Arab dishes like döner kebab and falafel, are well established, especially in bigger cities. International burger chains, as well as Chinese and Greek restaurants, are widespread. Indian, Thai, Japanese, and other Asian cuisines have gained popularity in recent decades.
Among high-profile restaurants in Germany, the Michelin guide has awarded nine restaurants three stars, the highest designation, while 15 more received two stars. German restaurants have become the world's second most decorated eateries after France.

Although German wine is becoming more popular in many parts of Germany, the national alcoholic drink is beer. German beer consumption per person is declining but—at 116 litres annually—it is still among the highest in the world. Beer varieties include Alt, Bock, Dunkel, Kölsch, Lager, Malzbier, Pils, and Weizenbier. Among 18 surveyed western countries, Germany ranked 14th in the list of per capita consumption of soft drinks in general, while it ranked third in the consumption of fruit juices. Furthermore, carbonated mineral water and "Schorle" (its mixture with fruit juice or wine) are very popular in Germany.

Germany is filled with inventors of board games, also known as Eurogames, that are played around the world. Popular games include The Settlers of Catan, which features hexagonal resource tiles that generate resources according to the roll of two dice, and Carcassonne with its randomly drawn square tiles that eventually make a medieval map and its notability for its meeples. The fervor for new games continued with Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride, and Alhambra. In 2008, Germany imported the popular card game Dominion from the US. Today, Germany publishes more board games than any other country per capita.

The German video gaming market is one of the largest in the world. The Gamescom in Cologne is the world's leading gaming convention. Popular game series from Germany include "Turrican", the "Anno" series, "The Settlers" series, the "Gothic" series, "SpellForce", the "X" series, the "FIFA Manager" series, "Far Cry" and "Crysis". The most relevant game developers and publishers are Blue Byte, Crytek, Deck13, Deep Silver, Daedalic Entertainment, Egosoft, Kalypso Media, Koch Media, Piranha Bytes, Related Designs and Yager Development. Bigpoint, Gameforge, Goodgame, Quake III Arena / Defrag and Wooga are leading developers of online and social games.

Sport forms an integral part of German life. 27,000,000 Germans are members of a sports club and an additional 12,000,000 pursue such an activity individually. Association football is the most popular sport. With more than 6,300,000 official members, the German Football Association ("Deutscher Fußball-Bund") is the largest sports organisation of its kind worldwide. The Bundesliga attracts the second-highest average attendance of any professional sports league in the world. The German national football team won the FIFA World Cup in 1954, 1974, 1990 and 2014 and the UEFA European Football Championship in 1972, 1980 and 1996. Germany has hosted the FIFA World Cup in 1974 and 2006 and the UEFA European Football Championship in 1988. Amongst the most successful and renowned footballers are: Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller, Jürgen Klinsmann, Lothar Matthäus, and Oliver Kahn. Other popular spectator sports include handball, volleyball, basketball, ice hockey, and tennis.

Germany is one of the leading motorsports countries in the world. Race-winning cars, teams and drivers have come from Germany. The most successful Formula One driver in history, Michael Schumacher, has set many significant motorsport records during his career, having won more Formula One World Drivers' Championships and more Formula One races than any other driver since Formula One's debut season in 1950. He is one of the highest paid sportsmen in history and became a billionaire athlete. Constructors like BMW and Mercedes are among the leading manufacturers in motorsport. Additionally, Porsche has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a prestigious annual endurance race held in France, 16 times, and Audi has won it 9 times. The Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters is a popular series in Germany.

Historically, German sportsmen have been some of the most successful contenders in the Olympic Games, ranking third in an all-time Olympic Games medal count, combining East and West German medals. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, Germany finished fifth in the medal count, while in the 2006 Winter Olympics they finished first.
Germany has hosted the Summer Olympic Games twice, in Berlin in 1936 and in Munich in 1972. The Winter Olympic Games took place in Germany once in 1936 when they were staged in the Bavarian twin towns of Garmisch and Partenkirchen.

Germany is a modern, advanced society, shaped by a plurality of lifestyles and regional identities. The country has established a high level of gender equality, promotes disability rights, and is legally and socially tolerant towards homosexuals. Gays and lesbians can legally adopt their partner's biological children, and civil unions have been permitted since 2001. The former Foreign minister Guido Westerwelle and the former mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, are openly gay.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, Germany's attitude towards immigrants changed. Until the mid-1990s, the opinion was widespread that Germany was not a country of immigration, even though about 20% of the population were of non-German origin. Today the government and a majority of the German society are acknowledging that immigrants from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds are part of German society and that controlled immigration should be initiated based on qualification standards.

Since the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the internal and external evaluation of Germany's national image has changed. In the annual Nation Brands Index global survey, Germany became significantly and repeatedly more highly ranked after the tournament. People in 20 different states assessed the country's reputation in terms of culture, politics, exports, its people and its attractiveness to tourists, immigrants and investments. Germany has been named the world's second most valued nation among 50 countries in 2010. Another global opinion poll, for the BBC, revealed that Germany is recognised for the most positive influence in the world in 2010. A majority of 59% have a positive view of the country, while 14% have a negative view.

With an expenditure of €67,000,000,000 on international travel in 2008, Germans spent more money on travel than any other country. The most visited destinations were Spain, Italy and Austria.

Mostly depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties with a disputed status as separate languages (e.g., Low German/Plautdietsch), it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language, 10-25 million as a second language, and 75–100 million as a foreign language. This would imply approximately 175-220 million German speakers worldwide.

Geographical distribution of German speakers

This article details the geographical distribution of speakers of the German language, regardless of the legislative status within the countries where it is spoken. In addition to the German-speaking area () in Europe, German-speaking minorities are present in many countries and on all six inhabited continents.

Namibia used to be a colony of the German Empire from 1884 to 1919. Mostly originating from German settlers who immigrated during this time, 25,000 to 30,000 people still speak German as a native tongue today. German, along with English and Afrikaans used to be a co-official language of Namibia from 1984 until its independence from South Africa in 1990. At this point, the Namibian government perceived Afrikaans and German as symbols for Apartheid and colonialism, and decided for English to be the sole official language, claiming that it was a "neutral" language as virtually no English native speakers existed in Namibia at that time. German, Afrikaans and several indigenous languages became "national languages" by law, identifying them as cultural heritages of the nation and ensuring the state to acknowledge and support their presence in the country. Today, German is used in a wide variety of spheres, especially business and tourism, as well as churches (most notably the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK)), schools (e.g. the Deutsche Höhere Privatschule Windhoek), literature (German-Namibian authors include ), radio (the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation produces radio programs in German), and music (e.g. artist EES). The Allgemeine Zeitung is also one of the three biggest newspapers in Namibia and the only German-language daily in Africa.

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. Germans settled quite extensively in South Africa, with many Calvinists immigrating from Northern Europe. Later on, more Germans settled in the KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere. Here, one of the largest communities are the speakers of "Nataler Deutsch", a variety of Low German, who are concentrated in and around Wartburg and to a lesser extent around Winterton. German is slowly disappearing elsewhere, but a number of communities still have a large number of speakers and some even have German language schools, such as the Hermannsburg German School. Furthermore, German was often a language taught as a foreign language in White South African schools during the Apartheid years (1948-1994). Today, the South African constitution identifies German as a "commonly used" language and the Pan South African Language Board is obligated to promote and ensure respect for it.

Australia has an estimated population of around 75,600 German speakers. Australians of German ancestry constitute the fourth largest ethnic group in Australia, numbering around 811,540. German immigrants played a significant role in settling the states of South Australia and Queensland. Barossa German, a dialect of German, was once common in and around the German-settled Barossa Valley in South Australia. However, the German language was actively suppressed by Australian governments during World War I and World War II, resulting in a sharp decline in the use of German in Australia. German Australians are today overwhelmingly English speaking, with the German language as a home language in heavy decline.

The German language is spoken in a number of countries and territories in Europe, where it is used both as an official language and as a minority language in various countries. To cover this language area, they are often referred to as the German-speaking countries, the German-speaking area (), or equivalently German-speaking Europe (non-European German-speaking communities are not commonly included in the concept).

German is the main language of approximately 95 to 100 million people in Europe, or 13.3% of all Europeans, being the second most spoken native language in Europe after Russian (with 144 million speakers), above French (with 66.5 million) and English (with 64.2 million).

The European countries with German-speaking majorities are Germany (95%, 78.3 million), Austria (89%, 7.4 million) and Switzerland (65%, 4.6 million), also known as "D-A-CH" countries. Other European countries and regions with a German-speaking majority include Liechtenstein (0.03 million), the Italian autonomous region of South-Tyrol (0.5 million) and the German-speaking Community of Belgium with around 70.000 native speakers.

Since 2004, there is an annual informal meeting of the heads of state of German-speaking countries including the Presidents of Germany, Austria and Switzerland and the Hereditary Prince of Liechtenstein. Since 2014 the King of Belgium and the Grand Duke of Luxembourg have also been taking part.

D-A-CH or DACH is an acronym used to represent the dominant states of the German language "Sprachraum". It is based on the international vehicle registration codes for:"Dach" is also the German word for "roof", and is used in linguistics in the term Dachsprache, which standard German arguably is in relation to some outlying dialects of German, especially in Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and Austria.

The term is sometimes extended to D-A-CH-Li, DACHL or DACH+ to include Liechtenstein. Another version is DACHS (with "Dachs" meaning "Badger" in German) with the inclusion of the German-speaking region of South Tyrol in Italy.

DACH is also the name of an Interreg IIIA project, which focuses on crossborder cooperation in planning.

In the Early Modern period, German varieties were a "lingua franca" of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe (Hanseatic League).

Today, German, together with French, is a common second foreign language in the western world, as English is well established as a first foreign language. German ranks second (after English) among the best known foreign languages in the EU (on par with French) as well as in Russia. In terms of student numbers across all levels of education, German ranks third in the EU (after English and French) as well as in the United States (after Spanish and French). In 2015, approximately 15.4 million people were in the process of learning German across all levels of education worldwide. As this number remained relatively stable since 2005 (± 1 million), roughly 75–100 million people able to communicate in German as foreign language can be inferred assuming an average course duration of three years and other estimated parameters. According to a 2012 survey, ca. 47 million people within the EU (i.e., up to two thirds of the 75-100 million worldwide) claimed to have sufficient German skills to have a conversation. Within the EU, and not counting countries where it is a (co-)official language, German as a foreign language is most widely taught in Central and Northern Europe, namely the Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Poland.

German as a foreign language is promoted by the Goethe Institute, which works to promote German language and culture worldwide. In association with the Goethe Institute, the German foreign broadcasting service, Deutsche Welle, offers a range of online German courses and worldwide television as well as radio broadcasts produced with non-native German speakers in mind.
At least one million German speakers live in Latin America. There are German speaking minorities in almost every Latin American country, including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. In the eighteenth century only isolated or small groups of German emigrants left for Latin America. However this pattern was reversed at the start of the last century as a tidal wave of German emigration began. German emigration to the Americas totalled 200,000 people during the eighteenth century. During the 1880s, during the wave of mass emigration, this figure was reached annually. The "Handbuch des Deutschtums im Ausland" ("The Germans Abroad Handbook") from 1906 puts a figure of 11 million people in North and South America with a knowledge of the German language, of which 9 million were in the US. Although the US was the focal point for emigration in the 19th century, emigration to Latin America was also significant for differing economic and political reasons.

The majority of German emigrants to Latin America went especially to Brazil but also to: Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

Starting in 1818, when King D. João VI brought the first German and Swiss immigrants to Brazil, German immigration continued a constant flow with an average of 25 to 30 thousand immigrants per decade entering the country since 1818. It peaked in the years following World War I, to around 90 thousand, and again in the 1940s to around 50,000. In the 1880s and 1890s, German emigration to Latin America grew and in some years was the destination of up to 30% of German emigrants. During the Nazi period - until the ban on emigration came into effect in 1941 - some 100,000 Jews from Central Europe, the vast majority of which were German speaking, moved to South America with 90% of these moving to the Cono Sur or Southern Cone. From the start of the 20th century until 1946 80% of Jews lived in Europe but by the end of World War II this was reduced to 25%, however after the war over 50% of Jews now lived in the Americas. This change was aided by Jewish emigration groups such as the Hilfsverein deutschsprechender Juden (later to become Asociación Filantrópica Israelita) which was based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The majority of German minorities in Latin America - as well as elsewhere around the world - experienced a decline in the use of the German language, with the exception of Brazil, where the dialect Riograndenser Hunsrückisch is being taught in schools and in some media, totaling over 200 thousand speakers spread over the Brazilian southern states.
The main cause of this decrease is the integration of communities, often originally sheltered, into the dominant society, and then modernisation after assimilation into society which confronts all immigrant groups.

Specific reasons for language change from German to the national language usually derive from the desire of many Germans to belong to their new communities after the end of World War II. This is a common feature among the German minorities in Latin America and those in Central and Eastern Europe: the majority of countries where German minorities lived had fought against the Germans during the war. With this change in situation the members of the German minorities, previously communities of status and prestige, were turned into undesirable minorities (though there were widespread elements of sympathy for Germany in many South American countries as well).

For many German minorities WWII thus represented the breaking point in the development of their language. In some South American countries the war period and immediately afterwards was a time of massive assimilation to the local culture (for example during the Getúlio Vargas period in Brazil).

Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay show some clear demographic differences that affect the minority situation of the German language: Brazil and Argentina are massive countries and offer large amounts of land for immigrants to settle. The population density of the Southern Cone countries is relatively low (Brazil has 17 inhabitants/km², Chile has 15/km², Argentina and Paraguay both have 10/km², data from 1993), but there are major differences in the areas settled by Germans: Buenos Aires Province, which was settled by Germans, has a far higher population density than that of the Chaco in northern Paraguay (with 1 inhabitant/km²). Argentina and Chile have a far greater proportion of city dwellers (86% and 84% respectively), while Brazil is 82% urbanised, and Paraguay is just 47% urbanised. Most of the German immigrants that arrived in Brazil went on to live in small inland communities. The original 58 German communities of the early 19th century Brazil, grew today to over 250 towns where Germans are a majority, and German speaking is encouraged.

There are about 500,000 German speakers and around 320,000 Volga-Germans alone, of which 200,000 hold German citizenship. This makes Argentina one of the countries with the largest number of German speakers and is second only in Latin America to Brazil. In the 1930s there were about 700,000 people of German descent.
Regional concentrations can be found in the provinces of Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires (with around 500,000 to 600,000) as well as Misiones and in the general area of the Chaco and the Pampas.

However most German-descended Argentinians do not speak German with native fluency (that role has been taken by Spanish). The 300,000 German speakers are estimated to be immigrants and not actually born in Argentina, and because of this they still speak their home language while their descendants who were born in Argentina speak primarily Spanish.

According to Deutsche Welle, there are some twelve million people of German ancestry in Brazil. Nevertheless, the number of people speaking any sort of German (Standard German, Hunsrückisch or East Pomeranian) is on the decrease, with 3 million speaking German as a first language today. The main variety of German in Brazil is Riograndenser Hunsrückisch which is to be found in the southern states. This version of German there has changed over 180 years of contact with Portuguese as well as the languages of other immigrant communities. Such contact has led to a new dialect of German concentrated in the German colonies in the southern province of Rio Grande do Sul. Although Riograndenser Hunsrückisch has long been the most widely spoken German dialect in southern Brazil, like all other minority languages in the region, it is experiencing very strong decline - especially in the last three or four decades. In all the vast majority of German descended Brazilians speaks Portuguese as their mother tongue today, and German is known only as a second or third language, if at all, to the point of initiatives to preserve the language being started recently in areas with strong German-descended presence, with government sponsored Gemeindeschulen. This is especially true for younger German-Brazilians. Another place where the German language continues alive is in some of the more of four thousand Brazilian Lutheran churches, in which some of the cults continue to be in German.

Chile (with a population of 15 million) has an estimated 40,000 German-speakers.
About 30,000 ethnic Germans arrived in Chile. During the first flux of German immigration (between 1846 and 1875) German colonies were primarily set up in the "Frontera" region. The second wave of immigration occurred between 1882 and 1914 and consisted mainly of industrial and agricultural workers, mainly from eastern Germany; the third wave (after 1918) settled mainly in the cities. As in Argentina and Brazil, these populations are today overwhelmingly Spanish speaking, and German as a home language is in heavy decline.

Colombia has a population of about 40 million people. Of the 40 million only 5,000 people of German descent speak the language. Many of these people settled in Antioquia, and el Eje Cafetero. Most of the immigration occurred during World War I until the end of the Cold War. Many of these ethnic Germans now speak primarily Spanish at home.

Germans came to South America in the world wars I and II, settling first in Colombia because of its wealth in natural resources and favourable weather conditions for agriculture. German immigrants built the Bavaria, Pilsen, Club soda Klausen factories in Cali, Barranquilla, Pereira, Medellin, and other cities. Germans born in Colombia celebrate Oktoberfest in Cali along with other traditions. There are currently German schools in various major cities around the country.

Costa Rica has a population of 4.8 million, and a German speaker population of 8,000 people. Many of these people are immigrants or native German speakers from Germany or Switzerland and 18th, 19th and 20th centuries massive immigration descendants. But also in the northern area of the country, there are 2,200 German Mennonites communities in Sarapiquí and San Carlos that spoke Plautdietsch and other Low German dialects.

This German-Costa Rican community is one of the most important and biggest collectivities of German speakers in Central America and the Caribbean, and has a lot of cultural and social institutions, churches, farms, business companies and schools.

In Canada, there are 622,650 speakers of German according to the most recent census in 2006, with people of German ancestry (German Canadians) found throughout the country. German-speaking communities are particularly found in British Columbia (118,035) and Ontario (230,330). There is a large and vibrant community in the city of Kitchener, Ontario, which was at one point named Berlin. German immigrants were instrumental in the country's three largest urban areas: Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver; post-Second World War immigrants managed to preserve a fluency in the German language in their respective neighborhoods and sections. In the first half of the 20th century, over a million German-Canadians made the language Canada's third most spoken after French and English.

In Mexico there are also large populations of German ancestry, mainly in the cities of: Mexico City, Puebla, Mazatlán, Tapachula, Ecatepec de Morelos, and larger populations scattered in the states of Chihuahua, Durango, and Zacatecas.

In the United States, the states of North Dakota and South Dakota are the only states where German is the most common language spoken at home after English. German geographical names can be found throughout the Midwest region of the country, such as New Ulm and many other towns in Minnesota; Bismarck (North Dakota's state capital), Munich, Karlsruhe, and Strasburg (named after a town near Odessa in Ukraine) in North Dakota; New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Weimar, and Muenster in Texas; Corn (formerly Korn), Kiefer and Berlin in Oklahoma; and Kiel, Berlin, and Germantown in Wisconsin.

Between 1843 and 1910, more than 5 million Germans emigrated overseas, mostly to the United States. German remained an important language in churches, schools, newspapers, and even the administration of the United States Brewers' Association through the early 20th century, but was severely repressed during World War I. Over the course of the 20th century, many of the descendants of 18th century and 19th century immigrants ceased speaking German at home, but small populations of speakers are still found in Pennsylvania (Amish, Hutterites, Dunkards and some Mennonites historically spoke Hutterite German and a West Central German variety of German known as Pennsylvania German or Pennsylvania Dutch), Kansas (Mennonites and Volga Germans), North Dakota (Hutterite Germans, Mennonites, Russian Germans, Volga Germans, and Baltic Germans), South Dakota, Montana, Texas (Texas German), Wisconsin, Indiana, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Ohio (72,570). A significant group of German Pietists in Iowa formed the Amana Colonies and continue to practice speaking their heritage language. Early twentieth century immigration was often to St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

The dialects of German which are or were primarily spoken in colonies or communities founded by German-speaking people resemble the dialects of the regions the founders came from. For example, Hutterite German resembles dialects of Carinthia. Texas German is a dialect spoken in the areas of Texas settled by the Adelsverein, such as New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. In the Amana Colonies in the state of Iowa, Amana German is spoken. Plautdietsch is a large minority language spoken in Northern Mexico by the Mennonite communities, and is spoken by more than 200,000 people in Mexico. Pennsylvania German is a West Central German dialect spoken by most of the Amish population of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana and resembles Palatinate German dialects.

Hutterite German is an Upper German dialect of the Austro-Bavarian variety of the German language, which is spoken by Hutterite communities in Canada and the United States. Hutterite is spoken in the U.S. states of Washington, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota; and in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Its speakers belong to some Schmiedleit, Lehrerleit, and Dariusleit Hutterite groups, but there are also speakers among the older generations of Prairieleit (the descendants of those Hutterites who chose not to settle in colonies). Hutterite children who grow up in the colonies learn to speak Hutterite German before learning English, the standard language of the surrounding areas, in school. Many of these children, though, continue with German Grammar School, in addition to public school, throughout a student's elementary education.

Minorities exist in the countries of the former Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy, Canada, Chile, the United States, Latin America, Namibia, South Africa, Israel, and Australia. These German minorities, through their ethno-cultural vitality, exhibit an exceptional level of heterogeneity: variations concerning their demographics, their status within the majority community, the support they receive from institutions helping them to support their identity as a minority.

Among them are small groups (such as those in Namibia) and many very large groups (such as the almost 1 million non-evacuated Germans in Russia and Kazakhstan or the near 500,000 Germans in Brazil (see Riograndenser Hunsrückisch German)), groups that have been greatly "folklorised" and almost completely linguistically assimilated (such as most people of German descent in the US, Canada, Australia, Argentina and Brazil), and others, such as the true linguistic minorities (like the still German-speaking minorities in the US, Argentina and Brazil, in western Siberia or in Romania and Hungary); other groups, which are classified as religio-cultural groups rather than ethnic minorities, (such as the Eastern-Low German speaking Mennonites in Paraguay, Mexico, Belize or in the Altay region of Siberia) and the groups who maintain their status thanks to strong identification with their ethnicity and their religious sentiment (such as the groups in Upper Silesia, Poland or in South Jutland in Denmark).

German is the main language of approximately 95 to 100 million people in Europe, or 13.3% of all Europeans, being the second most spoken native language in Europe after Russian (with 144 million speakers), above French (with 66.5 million) and English (with 64.2 million).

This article details the geographical distribution of speakers of the German language, regardless of the legislative status within the countries where it is spoken. In addition to the German-speaking area () in Europe, German-speaking minorities are present in many countries and on all six inhabited continents.

Mostly depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties with a disputed status as separate languages (e.g., Low German/Plautdietsch), it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language, 10-25 million as a second language, and 75–100 million as a foreign language. This would imply approximately 175-220 million German speakers worldwide.

Australia has an estimated population of around 75,600 German speakers. Australians of German ancestry constitute the fourth largest ethnic group in Australia, numbering around 811,540. German immigrants played a significant role in settling the states of South Australia and Queensland. Barossa German, a dialect of German, was once common in and around the German-settled Barossa Valley in South Australia. However, the German language was actively suppressed by Australian governments during World War I and World War II, resulting in a sharp decline in the use of German in Australia. German Australians are today overwhelmingly English speaking, with the German language as a home language in heavy decline.

The German language is spoken in a number of countries and territories in Europe, where it is used both as an official language and as a minority language in various countries. To cover this language area, they are often referred to as the German-speaking countries, the German-speaking area (), or equivalently German-speaking Europe (non-European German-speaking communities are not commonly included in the concept).

The European countries with German-speaking majorities are Germany (95%, 78.3 million), Austria (89%, 7.4 million) and Switzerland (65%, 4.6 million), also known as "D-A-CH" countries. Other European countries and regions with a German-speaking majority include Liechtenstein (0.03 million), the Italian autonomous region of South-Tyrol (0.5 million) and the German-speaking Community of Belgium with around 70.000 native speakers.

Since 2004, there is an annual informal meeting of the heads of state of German-speaking countries including the Presidents of Germany, Austria and Switzerland and the Hereditary Prince of Liechtenstein. Since 2014 the King of Belgium and the Grand Duke of Luxembourg have also been taking part.

D-A-CH or DACH is an acronym used to represent the dominant states of the German language "Sprachraum". It is based on the international vehicle registration codes for:"Dach" is also the German word for "roof", and is used in linguistics in the term Dachsprache, which standard German arguably is in relation to some outlying dialects of German, especially in Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and Austria.

The term is sometimes extended to D-A-CH-Li, DACHL or DACH+ to include Liechtenstein. Another version is DACHS (with "Dachs" meaning "Badger" in German) with the inclusion of the German-speaking region of South Tyrol in Italy.

DACH is also the name of an Interreg IIIA project, which focuses on crossborder cooperation in planning.

In the Early Modern period, German varieties were a "lingua franca" of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe (Hanseatic League).

The majority of German emigrants to Latin America went especially to Brazil but also to: Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

Specific reasons for language change from German to the national language usually derive from the desire of many Germans to belong to their new communities after the end of World War II. This is a common feature among the German minorities in Latin America and those in Central and Eastern Europe: the majority of countries where German minorities lived had fought against the Germans during the war. With this change in situation the members of the German minorities, previously communities of status and prestige, were turned into undesirable minorities (though there were widespread elements of sympathy for Germany in many South American countries as well).

For many German minorities WWII thus represented the breaking point in the development of their language. In some South American countries the war period and immediately afterwards was a time of massive assimilation to the local culture (for example during the Getúlio Vargas period in Brazil).

There are about 500,000 German speakers and around 320,000 Volga-Germans alone, of which 200,000 hold German citizenship. This makes Argentina one of the countries with the largest number of German speakers and is second only in Latin America to Brazil. In the 1930s there were about 700,000 people of German descent.
Regional concentrations can be found in the provinces of Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires (with around 500,000 to 600,000) as well as Misiones and in the general area of the Chaco and the Pampas.

However most German-descended Argentinians do not speak German with native fluency (that role has been taken by Spanish). The 300,000 German speakers are estimated to be immigrants and not actually born in Argentina, and because of this they still speak their home language while their descendants who were born in Argentina speak primarily Spanish.

Chile (with a population of 15 million) has an estimated 40,000 German-speakers.
About 30,000 ethnic Germans arrived in Chile. During the first flux of German immigration (between 1846 and 1875) German colonies were primarily set up in the "Frontera" region. The second wave of immigration occurred between 1882 and 1914 and consisted mainly of industrial and agricultural workers, mainly from eastern Germany; the third wave (after 1918) settled mainly in the cities. As in Argentina and Brazil, these populations are today overwhelmingly Spanish speaking, and German as a home language is in heavy decline.

Colombia has a population of about 40 million people. Of the 40 million only 5,000 people of German descent speak the language. Many of these people settled in Antioquia, and el Eje Cafetero. Most of the immigration occurred during World War I until the end of the Cold War. Many of these ethnic Germans now speak primarily Spanish at home.

Germans came to South America in the world wars I and II, settling first in Colombia because of its wealth in natural resources and favourable weather conditions for agriculture. German immigrants built the Bavaria, Pilsen, Club soda Klausen factories in Cali, Barranquilla, Pereira, Medellin, and other cities. Germans born in Colombia celebrate Oktoberfest in Cali along with other traditions. There are currently German schools in various major cities around the country.

Costa Rica has a population of 4.8 million, and a German speaker population of 8,000 people. Many of these people are immigrants or native German speakers from Germany or Switzerland and 18th, 19th and 20th centuries massive immigration descendants. But also in the northern area of the country, there are 2,200 German Mennonites communities in Sarapiquí and San Carlos that spoke Plautdietsch and other Low German dialects.

This German-Costa Rican community is one of the most important and biggest collectivities of German speakers in Central America and the Caribbean, and has a lot of cultural and social institutions, churches, farms, business companies and schools.

In Canada, there are 622,650 speakers of German according to the most recent census in 2006, with people of German ancestry (German Canadians) found throughout the country. German-speaking communities are particularly found in British Columbia (118,035) and Ontario (230,330). There is a large and vibrant community in the city of Kitchener, Ontario, which was at one point named Berlin. German immigrants were instrumental in the country's three largest urban areas: Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver; post-Second World War immigrants managed to preserve a fluency in the German language in their respective neighborhoods and sections. In the first half of the 20th century, over a million German-Canadians made the language Canada's third most spoken after French and English.

In Mexico there are also large populations of German ancestry, mainly in the cities of: Mexico City, Puebla, Mazatlán, Tapachula, Ecatepec de Morelos, and larger populations scattered in the states of Chihuahua, Durango, and Zacatecas.

In the United States, the states of North Dakota and South Dakota are the only states where German is the most common language spoken at home after English. German geographical names can be found throughout the Midwest region of the country, such as New Ulm and many other towns in Minnesota; Bismarck (North Dakota's state capital), Munich, Karlsruhe, and Strasburg (named after a town near Odessa in Ukraine) in North Dakota; New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Weimar, and Muenster in Texas; Corn (formerly Korn), Kiefer and Berlin in Oklahoma; and Kiel, Berlin, and Germantown in Wisconsin.

The dialects of German which are or were primarily spoken in colonies or communities founded by German-speaking people resemble the dialects of the regions the founders came from. For example, Hutterite German resembles dialects of Carinthia. Texas German is a dialect spoken in the areas of Texas settled by the Adelsverein, such as New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. In the Amana Colonies in the state of Iowa, Amana German is spoken. Plautdietsch is a large minority language spoken in Northern Mexico by the Mennonite communities, and is spoken by more than 200,000 people in Mexico. Pennsylvania German is a West Central German dialect spoken by most of the Amish population of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana and resembles Palatinate German dialects.

Minorities exist in the countries of the former Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy, Canada, Chile, the United States, Latin America, Namibia, South Africa, Israel, and Australia. These German minorities, through their ethno-cultural vitality, exhibit an exceptional level of heterogeneity: variations concerning their demographics, their status within the majority community, the support they receive from institutions helping them to support their identity as a minority.

The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 300–400 million native English speakers and over 100 million native German speakers. They belong to the West Germanic family. The West Germanic group also includes other major languages, such as Dutch with 23 million, Low Saxon with approximately 5 million speakers in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands, and Afrikaans with over 6 million native speakers. The North Germanic languages include Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. There is also the East Germanic branch, which includes languages such as Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, but it has been extinct for at least two centuries. The SIL "Ethnologue" lists 48 different living Germanic languages, with the Western branch accounting for 42, and the Northern for 6 languages. The total number of Germanic languages is unknown, as some of them, especially East Germanic languages, disappeared shortly after the Migration Period.

Indo-European migrations

Indo-European migrations were the migrations of pastoral peoples speaking the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), who departed from the Yamnaya and related cultures in the Pontic–Caspian steppe, starting at. Their descendants spread throughout Europe and parts of Asia, forming new cultures with the people they met on their way, including the Corded Ware culture in Northern Europe and the Vedic culture in the Indian subcontinent. These migrations ultimately seeded the cultures and languages of most of Europe, Greater Iran, and much of the Indian subcontinent (and subsequently resulted in the largest and most broadly spoken language family in the world).

Modern knowledge of these migrations is based on data from linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and genetics. Linguistics describes the similarities between various languages, and the linguistic laws at play in the changes in those languages (see Indo-European studies). Archaeological data describes the spread of the Proto-Indo-European culture and language in several stages: from the Proto-Indo-European homeland (probably situated in the Pontic–Caspian steppe), into Western Europe, Central, South and (very sporadically) Eastern Asia by migrations and by language shift through elite-recruitment as described by anthropological research. Recent genetic research has a growing contribution to the understanding of the historical relations between various historical cultures.

The Indo-European languages and cultures spread in various stages. Early migrations from c. 4200–3000 BCE brought archaic proto-Indo-European into the lower Danube valley, Anatolia, and the Altai region.

Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic probably developed in and spread from Central Europe into western Europe after new Yamnaya migrations into the Danube Valley, while Proto-Germanic and Proto-Balto-Slavic may have developed east of the Carpathian mountains, at present-day Ukraine, moving north and spreading with the Corded Ware culture in Middle Europe (third millennium BCE). Alternatively, a European branch of Indo-European dialects, termed "North-west Indo-European" and associated with the Beaker culture, may have been ancestral to not only Celtic and Italic, but also to Germanic and Balto-Slavic.

The Indo-Iranian language and culture emerged at the Sintashta culture (c. 2100–1800 BCE), at the eastern border of the Yamnaya horizon and the Corded ware culture, growing into the Andronovo culture (c. 1800–800 BCE). Indo-Aryans moved into the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (c. 2300–1700 BCE) and spread to the Levant (Mitanni), northern India (Vedic people, c. 1500 BCE), and China (Wusun). The Iranian languages spread throughout the steppes with the Scyths and into Iran with the Medes, Parthians and Persians from ca. 800 BCE.

The Indo-European languages constitute a family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 439 languages and dialects, according to the 2009 "Ethnologue" estimate, about half of these (221) belonging to the Indo-Aryan subbranch originating in South Asia. The Indo-European family includes most of the major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, the northern half of the Indian Subcontinent, Sri Lanka and was also predominant in ancient Anatolia. With written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek, the Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the second-longest recorded history, after the Afroasiatic family.

Indo-European languages are spoken by almost 3 billion native speakers, the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of native speakers according to "Ethnologue", twelve are Indo-European: Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, German, Punjabi, Marathi, French, Urdu, Italian, accounting for over 1.7 billion native speakers.

The similarities between various European languages, Sanskrit and Persian were noted by Sir William Jones when learning Sanskrit in India, concluding that all these languages originated from the same source. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other major language families.

The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the linguistic reconstruction of a common ancestor of the Indo-European languages spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. PIE was the first proposed proto-language to be widely accepted by linguists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing it than any other proto-language and it is by far the most well-understood of all proto-languages of its age. During the 19th century, the vast majority of linguistic work was devoted to reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European or its daughter proto-languages such as Proto-Germanic, and most of the current techniques of historical linguistics (e. g. the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction) were developed as a result.

Scholars estimate that PIE may have been spoken as a single language (before divergence began) around 3500 BCE, though estimates by different authorities can vary by more than a millennium. The most popular hypothesis for the origin and spread of the language is the Kurgan hypothesis, which postulates an origin in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe.

The existence of PIE was first postulated in the 18th century by Sir William Jones, who observed the similarities between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin. By the early 20th century, well-defined descriptions of PIE had been developed that are still accepted today (with some refinements). The largest developments of the 20th century have been the discovery of Anatolian and Tocharian languages and the acceptance of the laryngeal theory. The Anatolian languages have also spurred a major re-evaluation of theories concerning the development of various shared Indo-European language features and the extent to which these features were present in PIE itself.

PIE is thought to have had a complex system of morphology that included inflections (suffixing of roots, as in "who, whom, whose"), and ablaut (vowel alterations, as in "sing, sang, sung"). Nouns used a sophisticated system of declension and verbs used a similarly sophisticated system of conjugation.

Relationships to other language families, including the Uralic languages, have been proposed but remain controversial. There is no written evidence of Proto-Indo-European, so all knowledge of the language is derived by reconstruction from later languages using linguistic techniques such as the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction.

The Indo-Hittite hypothesis postulates a common predecessor for both the Anatolian languages and the other Indo-European languages, called Indi-Hittite or Indo-Anatolian. Although it is obvious that PIE had predecessors, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis is not widely accepted, and there is little to suggest that it is possible to reconstruct a proto-Indo-Hittite stage that differs substantially from what is already reconstructed for PIE.

A shared common ancestor of Indo-European and Uralic, Indo-Uralic, has been postulated as a possible pre-PIE. According to Kortlandt, "Indo-European is a branch of Indo-Uralic which was radically transformed under the influence of a North Caucasian substratum when its speakers moved from the area north of the Caspian Sea to the area north of the Black Sea."
Anthony states that the validity of such deep relationships cannot be reliably demonstrated due to the time-depth involved, and also notes that the similarities may be explained by borrowings from PIE into proto-Uralic. Yet, Anthony also notes that the North Caucasian communities "were southern participants in the steppe world".

Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following evolutionary tree of Indo-European branches:

David Anthony, following the methodology of Ringe and Warnow, proposes the following sequence:

Ringe and Warnow's methodology may be outdated, and not accurately reflect the development of the IE languages.

Archaeological research has unearthed a broad range of historical cultures which can be related to the spread of the Indo-European languages. Various steppe-cultures show strong similarities with the Yamna-horizon at the Pontic steppe, while the time-range of several Asian cultures also coincides with the proposed trajectory and time-range of the Indo-European migrations.

According to the widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis or "Steppe theory", the Indo-European language and culture spread in several stages from the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat in the Eurasian Pontic steppes into Western Europe, Central and South Asia, through folk migrations and so-called elite recruitment. This process started with the introduction of cattle at the Eurasian steppes around 5200 BCE, and the mobilisation of the steppe herder cultures with the introduction of wheeled wagons and horse-back riding, which led to a new kind of culture. Between 4,500 and 2,500 BCE, this "horizon", which includes several distinctive cultures, spread out over the Pontic steppes, and outside into Europe and Asia.

Early migrations at ca. 4200 BCE brought steppe herders into the lower Danube valley, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe. According to Anthony, the Anatolian branch, to which the Hittites belong, probably arrived in Anatolia from the Danube valley. According to Mathieson & Reich et al. (2017), it is unlikely that the Anatolian branch arrived in Anatolia via the Balkans.

Migrations eastward from the Yamnaya culture founded the Afanasevo culture which developed into the Tocharians. The Tarim mummies may represent a migration of Tocharian speakers from the Afanasevo culture into the Tarim Basin. Migrations southward may have founded the Maykop culture, but the Maykop origins could also have been in the Caucasus.

The western Indo-European languages (Germanic, Celtic, Italic) probably spread into Europe from the Balkan-Danubian complex, a set of cultures in Southeastern Europe. At ca. 3000 BCE a migration of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamna-culture took place toward the west, along the Danube river, Slavic and Baltic developed a little later at the middle Dniepr (present-day Ukraine), moving north toward the Baltic coast. The Corded Ware culture in Middle Europe (third millennium BCE), which materialized with a massive migration from the Eurasian steppes to Central Europe, probably played a central role in the spread of the pre-Germanic and pre-Balto-Slavic dialects.

The eastern part of the Yamnaya horizon and the Corded ware culture contributed to the Sintashta culture (c. 2100–1800 BCE), where the Indo-Iranian language and culture emerged, and where the chariot was invented. The Indo-Iranian language and culture was further developed in the Andronovo culture (c. 1800–800 BCE), and influenced by the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (c. 2300–1700 BCE). The Indo-Aryans split off around 1800–1600 BCE from the Iranians, whereafter Indo-Aryan groups moved to the Levant (Mitanni), northern India (Vedic people, c. 1500 BCE), and China (Wusun). The Iranian languages spread throughout the steppes with the Scyths and into Iran with the Medes, Parthians and Persians from ca. 800 BCE.

According to Marija Gimbutas, the process of ""Indo-Europeanization"" of Europe was essentially a cultural, not a physical transformation. It is understood as a migration of Yamnaya people to Europe, as military victors, successfully imposing a new administrative system, language and religion upon the indigenous groups, referred to by Gimbutas as "Old Europeans". The Yamnaya people's social organization, especially a patrilinear and patriarchal structure, greatly facilitated their effectiveness in war. According to Gimbutas, the social structure of "Old Europe" "contrasted with the Indo-European Kurgans who were mobile and non-egalitarian" with a hierarchically organised tripartite social structure; the IE were warlike, lived in smaller villages at times, and had an ideology that centered on the virile male, reflected also in their pantheon. In contrast, the indigenous groups of "Old Europe" had neither a warrior class nor horses.

Indo-European languages probably spread through language shifts. Small groups can change a larger cultural area, and elite male dominance by small groups may have led to a language shift in northern India.

According to Guus Kroonen, Indo-Europeans encountered existing populations that spoke dissimilar, unrelated languages when they migrated to Europe from Yamnaya steppes. Relatively little is known about the Pre-Indo-European linguistic landscape of Europe, except for Basque, as the "Indo-Europeanization" of Europe caused a largely unrecorded, massive linguistic extinction event, most likely through language-shift. Guus Kroonen's study reveals that PIE speech contains a clear Neolithic signature emanating from the Aegean language family and thus patterns with the prehistoric migration of Europe's first farming populations.

According to Edgar Polomé, 30 % of non-Indo-European substratum found in modern German derives from non-Indo-European-speakers of Funnelbeaker Culture indigenous to southern Scandinavia. When Yamnaya Indo-European speakers came into contact with the indigenous peoples during the third millennium BCE, they came to dominate the local populations yet parts of the indigenous lexicon persisted in the formation of Proto-Germanic, thus lending to the Germanic languages the status of "Indo-Europeanized" languages. According again to Marija Gimbutas, Corded Ware cultures migration to Scandinavia "synthesized" with the Funnelbeaker culture, giving birth to the Proto-Germanic language.

David Anthony, in his "revised Steppe hypothesis" notes that the spread of the Indo-European languages probably did not happen through "chain-type folk migrations", but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites, which were emulated by large groups of people, a process which he calls "elite recruitment".

According to Parpola, local elites joined "small but powerful groups" of Indo-European speaking migrants. These migrants had an attractive social system and good weapons, and luxury goods which marked their status and power. Joining these groups was attractive for local leaders, since it strengthened their position, and gave them additional advantages. These new members were further incorporated by matrimonial alliances.

According to Joseph Salmons, language shift is facilitated by "dislocation" of language communities, in which the elite is taken over. According to Salmons, this change is facilitated by "systematic changes in community structure", in which a local community becomes incorporated in a larger social structure.

Since the 2000s genetical studies are assuming a prominent role in the research on Indo-European migrations. Whole-genome studies reveal relations between various cultures and the time-range in which those relations were established. Research by Haak et al. (2015) showed that ~75% of the Corded Ware ancestry came from Yamna-related populations, while Allentoft et al. (2015) shows that the Sintashta culture is genetically related to the Corded Ware culture. Quiles (2017) has proposed a relation between the "expansion of peoples belonging to haplogroup R1b in Eurasia" and the diffusion of Indo-European languages.

Climate change and drought may have triggered both the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers, and the migration of Indo-Europeans from the steppes in south central Asia and India.

Around 4200–4100 BCE a climate change occurred, manifesting in colder winters in Europe. Steppe herders, archaic Proto-Indo-European speakers, spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200–4000 BCE, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe.

The Yamnaya horizon was an adaptation to a climate change which occurred between 3500 and 3000 BCE, in which the steppes became drier and cooler. Herds needed to be moved frequently to feed them sufficiently, and the use of wagons and horse-back riding made this possible, leading to "a new, more mobile form of pastoralism".

In the second millennium BCE widespread aridization led to water shortages and ecological changes in both the Eurasian steppes and south Asia. At the steppes, humidization led to a change of vegetation, triggering "higher mobility and transition to the nomadic cattle breeding". Water shortage also had a strong impact in south Asia, "causing the collapse of sedentary urban cultures in south central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and India, and triggering large-scale migrations".

The Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses are tentative identifications of the "Urheimat", or primary homeland, of the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language. Such identifications attempt to be consistent with the glottochronology of the language tree and with the archaeology of those places and times. Identifications are made on the basis of how well, if at all, the projected migration routes and times of migration fit the distribution of Indo-European languages, and how closely the sociological model of the original society reconstructed from Proto-Indo-European lexical items fits the archaeological profile.

Since the early 1980s the mainstream consensus among Indo-Europeanists favors Marija Gimbutas' "Kurgan hypothesis", c.q. David Anthony's "Revised Steppe theory", derived from Gimbutas' pioneering work, placing the Indo-European homeland in the Pontic steppe, more specifically, between the Dniepr (Ukraine) and the Ural river (Russia), of the Chalcolithic period (4th to 5th millennia BCE), where various related cultures developed. The Pontic steppe is a large area of grasslands in far Eastern Europe, located north of the Black Sea, Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea and including parts of eastern Ukraine, southern Russia and northwest Kazakhstan. This is the time and place of the earliest domestication of the horse, which according to this hypothesis was the work of early Indo-Europeans, allowing them to expand outwards and assimilate or conquer many other cultures. The Yamnaya culture (3300–2500 BCE), located on the middle Don and Volga, is the specific culture from where this expansion in its major form started.

The primary competitor is the Anatolian hypothesis advanced by Colin Renfrew, which states that the Indo-European languages began to spread peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) from around 7000 BCE with the Neolithic advance of farming ("wave of advance"). Another theory which has drawn considerable attention is the Armenian plateau hypothesis of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, who have argued that the urheimat was south of the Caucasus, specifically, "within eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus and northern Mesopotamia" in the fifth to fourth millennia BCE.

All hypotheses assume a significant period (at least 1500–2000 years) between the time of the Proto-Indo-European language and the earliest attested texts, at Kültepe, c. 19th century BCE.

The Kurgan hypothesis (also theory or model) argues that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" (a term grouping the Yamnaya or Pit Grave culture and its predecessors) in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language. The term is derived from "kurgan" (), a Turkic loanword in Russian for a tumulus or burial mound. An origin at the Pontic-Caspian steppes is the most widely accepted scenario of Indo-European origins.

Marija Gimbutas formulated her Kurgan hypothesis in the 1950s, grouping together a number of related cultures at the Pontic steppes. She defined the "Kurgan culture" as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the Dnieper/Volga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BCE). The bearers of these cultures were nomadic pastoralists, who, according to the model, by the early 3rd millennium expanded throughout the Pontic-Caspian steppe and into Eastern Europe.

Gimbutas' grouping is nowadays considered to have been too broad. According to Anthony, it is better to speak of the Yamnaya culture or of a "Yamnaya horizon", which included several related cultures, as the defining Proto-Indo-European culture at the Pontic steppe. David Anthony has incorporated recent developments in his "revised steppe theory", which also supports a steppe origin of the Indo-European languages. Anthony emphasizes the Yamnaya culture as the origin of the Indo-European dispersal. Recent research by Haak et al. (2015) confirms the migration of Yamnaya-people into western Europe, forming the Corded Ware culture.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), a reconstructed prehistoric language of Eurasia. Knowledge of them comes chiefly from the linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics.

According to some archaeologists, PIE speakers cannot be assumed to have been a single, identifiable people or tribe, but were a group of loosely related populations ancestral to the later, still partially prehistoric, Bronze Age Indo-Europeans. This view is held especially by those archaeologists who posit an original homeland of vast extent and immense time depth. However, this view is not shared by linguists, as proto-languages generally occupy small geographical areas over a very limited time span, and are generally spoken by close-knit communities such as a single small tribe.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans were likely to have lived during the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium BCE. Mainstream scholarship places them in the forest-steppe zone immediately to the north of the western end of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe. Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the middle Neolithic (5500 to 4500 BCE) or even the early Neolithic (7500 to 5500 BCE), and suggest alternative Proto-Indo-European Urheimats.

By the late third millennium BCE, offshoots of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached Anatolia (Hittites), the Aegean (Mycenaean Greece), Western Europe, and southern Siberia (Afanasevo culture).

The proto-Indo-Europeans, i. e. the Yamnaya people and the related cultures, seem to have been a mix from eastern European hunter-gatherers; and people related to the near east, i. e. Caucasus hunter-gatherers i. e. Iran Chalcolithic people with a Caucasian hunter-gatherer component.

According to Haak et al. (2015), "the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but from a population of Near Eastern ancestry."

According to Jones et al. (2015), Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) "genomes significantly contributed to the Yamnaya steppe herders who migrated into Europe ~3,000 BCE, supporting a formative Caucasus influence on this important Early Bronze age culture. CHG left their imprint on modern populations from the Caucasus and also central and south Asia possibly marking the arrival of Indo-Aryan languages."

According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), "a population related to the people of the Iran Chalcolithic contributed ~ 43 % of the ancestry of early Bronze Age populations of the steppe." These Iranian Chacolithic people were a mixture of "the Neolithic people of western Iran, the Levant, and Caucasus Hunter Gatherers".

Alberto Piazza and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza have tried in the 2000s to align the Anatolian hypothesis with the Steppe theory. According to Alberto Piazza, writing in 2000, "[i]t is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Turkey." According to Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza (2006), the Yamna-culture may have been derived from Middle Eastern Neolithic farmers who migrated to the Pontic steppe and developed pastoral nomadism. Wells agrees with Cavalli-Sforza that there is ""some" genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East." Nevertheless, the Anatolian hypothesis has been rejected, since it is incompatible with the gowing data on the genetic history of the Yamnaya-people.

According to Anthony, the development of the Proto-Indo-European cultures started with the introduction of cattle at the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Until ca. 5200–5000 BCE the Pontic-Caspian steppes were populated by hunter-gatherers. According to Anthony, the first cattle herders arrived from the Danube Valley at ca. 5800–5700 BCE, descendants from the first European farmers. They formed the Criş culture (5800–5300 BCE), creating a cultural frontier at the Prut-Dniestr watershed. The adjacent Bug-Dniester culture (6300–5500 BCE) was a local forager culture, from where cattle breeding spread to the steppe peoples. The Dniepr Rapids area was the next part of the Pontic-Caspian steppes to shift to cattle-herding. It was the densely populated area of the Pontic-Caspian steppes at the time, and had been inhabited by various hunter-gatherer populations since the end of the Ice Age. From ca.5800–5200 it was inhabited by the first phase of the Dnieper-Donets culture, a hunter-gatherer culture contemporaneous with the Bug-Dniestr culture.

At ca. 5200–5000 BCE the non-Indo-European Cucuteni-Tripolye culture (6000–3500 BCE) appears east of the Carpathian mountains, moving the cultural frontier to the Southern Bug valley, while the foragers at the Dniepr Rapids shifted to cattle herding, marking the shift to Dniepr-Donets II (5200/5000 – 4400/4200 BCE). The Dniepr-Donets culture kept cattle not only for ritual sacrifices, but also for their daily diet. The Khvalynsk culture (4700–3800 BCE), located at the middle Volga, which was connected with the Danube Valley by trade networks, also had cattle and sheep, but they were "more important in ritual sacrifices than in the diet". The Samara culture (early 5th millennium BCE), north of the Khvalynsk culture, interacted with the Khvalynsk culture, while the archaeological findings seem related to those of the Dniepr-Dontes II Culture.

The Sredny Stog culture (4400–3300 BCE) appears at the same location as the Dniepr-Donets culture, but shows influences from people who came from the Volga river region.

The Khvalynsk culture (4700–3800 BCE) (middle Volga) and the Don-based Repin culture (ca.3950–3300 BCE) preceded the Yamnaya culture (3300–2500 BCE), which originated in the Don-Volga area. Late pottery from these two cultures can barely be distinguished from early Yamnaya pottery.

The Yamnaya horizon was an adaptation to a climate change which occurred between 3500 and 3000 BCE, in which the steppes became drier and cooler. Herds needed to be moved frequently to feed them sufficiently, and the use of wagons and horse-back riding made this possible, leading to "a new, more mobile form of pastoralism". It was accompanied by new social rules and institutions, to regulate the local migrations in the steppes, creating a new social awareness of a distinct culture, and of "cultural Others" who did not participate in these new institutions.

The Yamnaya culture c.q. horizon (a.k.a. Pit Grave culture) spreads quickly across the Pontic-Caspian steppes between ca. 3400 and 3200 BCE. According to Anthony, "the spread of the Yamnaya horizon was the material expression of the spread of late Proto-Indo-European across the Pontic-Caspian steppes." Anthony further notes that "the Yamnaya horizon is the visible archaeological expression of a social adjustment to high mobility – the invention of the political infrastructure to manage larger herds from mobile homes based in the steppes." The Yamnaya horizon represents the classical reconstructed Proto-Indo-European society with stone idols, predominantly practising animal husbandry in permanent settlements protected by hillforts, subsisting on agriculture, and fishing along rivers. According to Gimbutas, contact of the Yamnaya culture with late Neolithic Europe cultures results in the "kurganized" Globular Amphora and Baden cultures. Anthony excludes the Globular Amphora culture.

The Maykop culture (3700–3000) emerges somewhat earlier in the northern Caucasus. Although considered by Gimbutas as an outgrowth of the steppe cultures, it is related to the development of Mesopotamia, and Anthony does not consider it to be a Proto-Indo-European culture. The Maykop culture shows the earliest evidence of the beginning Bronze Age, and Bronze weapons and artifacts are introduced to the Yamnaya horizon.

Between 3100 and 2600 BCE the Yamnaya people spread into the Danube Valley as far as Hungary. This migration probably gave rise to Proto-Celtic and Pre-Italic. Pre-Germanic dialects may have developed between the Dniestr (west Ukraine) and the Vistula (Poland) at c. 3100–2800 BCE, and spread with the Corded Ware culture. Slavic and Baltic developed at the middle Dniepr (present-day Ukraine) at c. 2800 BCE, also spreading with the Corded Ware horizon.

In the northern Don-Volga area the Yamnaya culture was followed by the Poltavka culture (2700–2100 BCE), while the Sintashta culture (2100–1800) extended the Indo-European culture zone east of the Ural mountains, giving rise to Proto-Indo-Iranian and the subsequent spread of the Indo-Iranian languages toward India and the Iranian plateau.

According to Anthony, steppe herders, archaic Proto-Indo-European speakers, spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200–4000 BCE, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe. According to Anthony, their languages "probably included archaic Proto-Indo-European dialects of the kind partly preserved later in Anatolian." According to Anthony their descendants later moved into Anatolia, at an unknown time, but maybe as early as 3,000 BCE. According to Mathieson & Reich et al. (2017), it is unlikely that the Anatolian branch arrived in Anatolia via the Balkans.

According to Parpola, the appearance of Indo-European speakers from Europe into Anatolia, and the appearance of Hittite, is related to later migrations of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamna-culture into the Danube Valley at ca. 2800 BCE, which is in line with the "customary" assumption that the Anatolian Indo-European language was introduced into Anatolia somewhere in the third millennium BCE.

The Anatolians were a group of distinct Indo-European peoples who spoke the Anatolian languages and shared a common culture. The Anatolian languages were a branch of the larger Indo-European language family.

Although the Hittites are placed in the 2nd millennium BCE, the Anatolian branch seems to have separated at a very early stage from Proto-Indo-European, or may have developed from an older Pre-Proto-Indo-European ancestor. If it separated from Proto-Indo-European, it likely did so between 4500–3500 BCE.

The archaeological discovery of the archives of the Hittites and the belonging of the Hittite language to a separate Anatolian branch of the Indo-European languages caused a sensation among historians, forcing a re-evaluation of Near Eastern history and Indo-European linguistics. In accordance with the Kurgan hypothesis, J. P. Mallory notes in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture that it is likely that the Anatolians reached the Near East from the north, either via the Balkans or the Caucasus in the 3rd millennium BCE. According to Anthony, descendants of archaic Proto-Indo-European steppe herders, who moved into the lower Danube valley about 4200–4000 BCE, later moved into Anatolia, at an unknown time, but maybe as early as 3,000 BCE. According to Parpola the movement into Anatolia took place at a later date. According to Mathieson & Reich et al. (2017), it is unlikely that the Anatolian branch arrived in Anatolia via the Balkans.

Together with the Tocharians, the Anatolians constituted the first known wave of Indo-European emigrants out of the Eurasian steppe. Although they had wagons, they probably emigrated before Indo-Europeans had learned to use chariots for war. It is likely that their arrival was one of gradual settlement and not as an invading army. The Anatolians' earliest linguistic and historical attestation are as names mentioned in Assyrian mercantile texts from 19th-century BCE Kanesh.

The Hittites, who established an extensive empire in the Middle East in the 2nd millennium BCE, are by far the best known members of the Anatolian group. The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in the area of their kingdom, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Egypt and the Middle East. Despite the use of "Hatti" for their core territory, the Hittites should be distinguished from the Hattians, an earlier people who inhabited the same region (until the beginning of the 2nd millennium). The Hittite military made successful use of chariots. Although belonging to the Bronze Age, they were the forerunners of the Iron Age, developing the manufacture of iron artifacts from as early as the 14th century, when letters to foreign rulers reveal the latter's demand for iron goods. The Hittite empire reached its height during the mid-14th century under Suppiluliuma I, when it encompassed an area that included most of Asia Minor as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. After 1180 BCE, amid the Bronze Age Collapse in the Levant associated with the sudden arrival of the Sea Peoples, the kingdom disintegrated into several independent "Neo-Hittite" city-states, some of which survived until as late as the 8th century BCE. The lands of the Anatolian peoples were successively invaded by a number of peoples and empires at high frequency: the Phrygians, Bithynians, the Medes, the Persians, the Greeks, the Galatian Celts, Romans and the Oghuz Turks. Many of these invaders settled in Anatolia, in some cases causing the extinction of the Anatolian languages. By the Middle Ages, all the Anatolian languages (and the cultures accompanying them) were extinct, although there may be lingering influences on the modern inhabitants of Anatolia, most notably Armenians.

The Maykop culture (also spelled Maikop), c. 3700–3000 BCE, was a major Bronze Age archaeological culture in the Western Caucasus region of Southern Russia. It extends along the area from the Taman Peninsula at the Kerch Strait to near the modern border of Dagestan and southwards to the Kura River. The culture takes its name from a royal burial found in Maykop kurgan in the Kuban River valley.

According to Mallory and Adams, migrations southward founded the Maykop culture (c. 3500–2500 BCE). Yet, according to Mariya Ivanova the Maykop origins were on the Iranian Plateau, while kurgans from the beginning of the 4th millennium at Soyuqbulaq in Azerbaijan, which belong to the Leyla-Tepe culture, show parallels with the Maykop kurgans. According to Museyibli, "the Leylatepe Culture tribes migrated to the north in the mid-fourth millennium and played an important part in the rise of the Maikop Culture of the North Caucasus."

The Afanasievo culture (3300 to 2500 BCE) is the earliest Eneolithic archaeological culture found until now in south Siberia, occupying the Minusinsk Basin, Altay and Eastern Kazakhstan. It originated with a migration of people from the pre-Yamnaya Repin culture, at the Don river, and is related to the Tocharians.

Radiocarbon gives dates as early as 3705 BCE on wooden tools and 2874 BCE on human remains for the Afanasievo culture. The earliest of these dates has now been rejected, giving a date of around 3300 BCE for the start of the culture.

The Tocharians, or "Tokharians" ( or ) were inhabitants of medieval oasis city-states on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (modern Xinjiang, China). Their Tocharian languages (a branch of the Indo-European family) are known from manuscripts from the 6th to 8th centuries CE, after which they were supplanted by the Turkic languages of the Uyghur tribes. These people were called "Tocharian" by late 19th-century scholars who identified them with the "Tókharoi" described by ancient Greek sources as inhabiting Bactria. Although this identification is now generally considered mistaken, the name has become customary.

The Tocharians are thought to have developed from the Afanasevo culture of eastern Siberia (c. 3500–2500 BCE). It is believed that the Tarim mummies, dated from 1800 BCE, represent a migration of Tocharian speakers from the Afanasevo culture in the Tarim Basin in the early 2nd millennium BCE. By the end of the 2nd millennium BCE, the dominant people as far east as the Altai Mountains southward to the northern outlets of the Tibetan Plateau were anthropologically Caucasian, with the northern part speaking Iranian Scythian languages and the southern parts Tocharian languages, having Mongoloid populations as their northeastern neighbors. These two groups were in competition with each other until the latter overcame the former. The turning point occurred around the 5th to 4th centuries BCE with a gradual Mongolization of Siberia, while Eastern Central Asia (East Turkistan) remained Caucasian and Indo-European-speaking until well into the 1st millennium CE.

The Sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank has suggested that the Yuezhi, the Wusun the Dayuan, the Kangju and the people of Yanqi, could have been Tocharian-speaking. Of these the Yuezhi are generally held to have been Tocharians. The Yuezhi were originally settled in the arid grasslands of the eastern Tarim Basin area, in what is today Xinjiang and western Gansu, in China. After the Yuezhi were defeated by the Xiongnu, in the 2nd century BCE, a small group, known as the Little Yuezhi, fled to the south, later spawning the Jie people who dominated the Later Zhao until their complete extermination by Ran Min in the Wei–Jie war. The majority of the Yuezhi however migrated west to the Ili Valley, where they displaced the Sakas (Scythians). Driven from the Ili Valley shortly afterwards by the Wusun, the Yuezhi migrated to Sogdia and then Bactria, where they are often identified with the "Tókharoi" (Τοχάριοι) and "Asioi" of Classical sources. They then expanded into northern South Asia, where one branch of the Yuezhi founded the Kushan Empire. The Kushan empire stretched from Turfan in the Tarim Basin to Pataliputra on the Gangetic plain at its greatest extent, and played an important role in the development of the Silk Road and the transmission of Buddhism to China. Tocharian languages continued to be spoken in the city-states of the Tarim Basin, only becoming extinct in the Middle Ages.

Between ca. 4000 and 3000 BCE, neolithic populations in western Europe declined, probably due to the pest. This decline was followed by the migrations of Indo-European populations into western Europe, transforming the genetic make-up of the western populations.

Three autosomal genetic studies in 2015 gave support to the Kurgan hypothesis of Gimbutas regarding the proto-Indo-European homeland. According to those studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a would have expanded from the West Eurasian Steppe, along with the Indo-European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo-European Languages.

Mallory notes that the Italic, Celtic and Germanic languages are closely related, which accords with their historic distribution. The Germanic languages are also related to the Baltic and Slavic languages, which in turn share similarities with the Indo-Iranic languages. The Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iranian languages are also related, which suggests "a chain of central Indo-European dialects stretching from the Balkans across the Black sea to the east Caspian". And the Celtic, Italic, Anatolian and Tocharian languages preserve archaisms which are preserved only in those languages. According to David Anthony, pre-Germanic split off earliest (3300 BCE), followed by pre-Italic and pre-Celtic (3000 BCE), pre-Armenian (2800 BCE), pre-Balto-Slavic (2800 BCE) and pre-Greek (2500 BCE).

The Balkan-Danubian complex is a set of cultures in Southeast Europe from which the western Indo-European languages probably spread into western Europe from c. 3500 BCE. According to Anthony, Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic and Pre-Germanic may have split off here from Proto-Indo-European.

The Usatovo culture developed in south-eastern Central Europe at around 3300–3200 BCE at the Dniestr river. Although closely related to the Tripolye culture, it is contemporary with the Yamnaya culture, and resembles it in significant ways. According to Anthony, it may have originated with "steppe clans related to the Yamnaya horizon who were able to impose a patron-client relationship on Tripolye farming villages".

According to Anthony, the Pre-Germanic dialects may have developed in this culture between the Dniestr (west Ukraine) and the Vistula (Poland) at c. 3100–2800 BCE, and spread with the Corded Ware culture.

Between 3100 and 2800/2600 BCE, when the Yamnaya horizon spread fast across the Pontic Steppe, a real folk migration of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamna-culture took place into the Danube Valley, moving along Usatovo territory toward specific destinations, reaching as far as Hungary, where as many as 3,000 kurgans may have been raised. Bell Beaker sites at Budapest, dated c. 2800–2600 BCE, may have aided in spreading Yamnaya dialects into Austria and southern Germany at their west, where Proto-Celtic may have developed. Pre-Italic may have developed in Hungary, and spread toward Italy via the Urnfield culture and Villanovan culture. According to Anthony, Slavic and Baltic developed at the middle Dniepr (present-day Ukraine) at c. 2800 BCE, spreading north from there.

According to Parpola, this migration into the Danube Valley is related to the appearance of Indo-European speakers from Europe into Anatolia, and the appearance of Hittite.

The Balkan languages (Thracian, Dacian, Illyrian) may have developed among of the early Indo-European populations of southeastern Europe. In the early Middle Ages their territory was occupied by migrating Slavic people, and by east Asian steppe peoples.

The Corded Ware culture in Middle Europe (c. 3200 or 2,900–2450 or 2350 cal. BCE) is hypothesized to have played an essential role in the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages in Europe during the Copper and Bronze Ages. David Anthony states that "Childe (1953:133-38) and Gimbutas (1963) speculated that migrants from the steppe Yamnaya culture (3300–2600 BCE) might have been the creators of the Corded Ware culture and carried IE languages into Europe from the steppes." According to Gimbutas, the Corded Ware culture was preceded by the Globular Amphora culture (3400–2800 BCE), which she also regarded to be an Indo-European culture. The Globular Amphora culture stretched from central Europe to the Baltic sea, and emerged from the Funnelbeaker culture.

According to Mallory, the Corded Ware culture may be postulated as "the common prehistoric ancestor of the later Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly some of the Indo-European languages of Italy". Yet, Mallory also notes that the Corded Ware can not account for Greek, Illyrian, Thracian and East Italic, which may be derived from Southeast Europe. According to Anthony, the Corded ware horizon may have introduced Germanic, Baltic and Slavic into northern Europe.

The Corded Ware spread across northern Europe after 3000 BCE, with an "initial rapid spread" between 2900 and 2700 BCE. Around 2400 BCE the people of the Corded Ware replaced their predecessors and expanded to Danubian and Nordic areas of western Germany. A related branch invaded Denmark and southern Sweden. In places a continuity between Funnelbeaker and Corded Ware can be demonstrated, whereas in other areas Corded Ware heralds a new culture and physical type. According to Cunliffe, most of the expansion was clearly intrusive. Yet, according to Furholt, the Corded Ware culture was an indigenous development, connecting local developments into a larger network.

Recent research by Haak et al. found that four late Corded Ware people (2500–2300 BCE) buried at Esperstadt, Germany, were genetically very close to the Yamna-people, stating that a massive migration took place from the Eurasian steppes to Central Europe. Haak et al. (2015) note that German Corded ware "trace ~75% of their ancestry to the Yamna," envisioning a migration of both males and females from the Yamnaya culture through western Ukraine and Poland into Germany. Allentoft et al. (2015) envision a migration from the Yamnaya culture towards northern Europe, both via Central Europe and the territory of present-day Russia, toward the Baltic area and the eastern periphery of the Corded ware culture. In supplementary information to Haak et al. (2015) Anthony, together with Lazaridis, Haak, Patterson, and Reich, notes that the mass migration of Yamnaya people to northern Europe shows that "the languages could have been introduced simply by strength of numbers: via major migration in which both sexes participated."

Anthony (2017) relates these close genetical similarities, and the development of the Corded ware culture, to the early third century Yamna-migrations into the Danube-valley, stating that "[t]he migration stream that created these intrusive cemeteries now can be seen to have continued from eastern Hungary across the Carpatians into southern Poland, where the earlies material traits of the Corded ware horizon appeared."

Volker Heyd has cautioned to be careful with drawing too strong conclusions from those genetic similarities between Corded Ware and Yamna, noting the small number of samples; the late dates of the Esperstadt graves, which could also have undergone Bell Beaker admixture; the presence of Yamna-ancestry in western Europe before the Danube-expansion; and the risks of extrapolating "the results from a handful of individual burials to whole ethnically interpreted populations." Heyd confirms the close connection between Corded Ware and Yamna, but also states that "neither a one-to-one translation from Yamnaya to CWC, nor even the 75:25 ratio as claimed (Haak "et al." 2015:211) fits the archaeological record."

The Bell Beaker-culture ("c." 2900–1800 BCE) may have spread proto-Celtic. More recently Mallory has suggested that the Beaker culture was associated with a European branch of Indo-European dialects, termed "North-west Indo-European", ancestral to not only Celtic but equally Italic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic.

The initial moves from the Tagus estuary were maritime. A southern move led to the Mediterranean where 'enclaves' were established in southwestern Spain and southern France around the Golfe du Lion and into the Po valley in Italy, probably via ancient western Alpine trade routes used to distribute jadeite axes. A northern move incorporated the southern coast of Armorica. The enclave established in southern Brittany was linked closely to the riverine and landward route, via the Loire, and across the Gâtinais valley to the Seine valley, and thence to the lower Rhine. This was a long-established route reflected in early stone axe distributions and it was via this network that Maritime Bell Beakers first reached the Lower Rhine in about 2600 BCE.

The Germanic peoples (also called Teutonic, Suebian or Gothic in older literature) are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic starting during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.

The term "Germanic" originated in classical times, when groups of tribes were referred to using this term by Roman authors. For them, the term was not necessarily based upon language, but rather referred to tribal groups and alliances who were considered less civilised than the Celtic Gauls living in the region of modern France. Tribes referred to as Germanic in that period lived generally to the north and east of the Gauls with the Rhine as an approximate border line.

In modern times the term occasionally has been used to refer to ethnic groups who speak a Germanic language and claim ancestral and cultural connections to ancient Germanic peoples. Within this context, modern Germanic peoples include the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, Germans, Austrians, English, Dutch, Afrikaners, Flemish, Frisians and others.

The Germanic languages are spoken by a sizable population in Western Europe, North America, and Australasia. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic (also known as Common Germanic), which was spoken in approximately the middle of the 1st millennium BCE in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from northern Europe in the 2nd century BCE, to settle in north-central Europe.

The Italic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European language family originally spoken by Italic peoples. They include the Romance languages derived from Latin (Italian, Sardinian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Occitan, etc.); a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, South Picene; and Latin itself. At present, Latin and its daughter Romance languages are the only surviving languages of the Italic language family.

The most widely accepted theory suggests that Latins and other proto-Italic tribes first entered in Italy with the late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture, then part of the central European Urnfield culture system. In particular various authors, like Marija Gimbutas, had noted important similarities between Proto-Villanova, the South-German Urnfield culture of Bavaria-Upper Austria and Middle-Danube Urnfield culture. According to David W. Anthony, proto-Latins originated in today's eastern Hungary, kurganized around 3100 BCE by the Yamnaya culture, while Kristian Kristiansen associated the Proto-Villanovans with the Velatice-Baierdorf culture of Moravia and Austria.

Today the Romance languages, which comprise all languages that descended from Latin, are spoken by more than 800 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Romance languages are either official, co-official, or significantly used in 72 countries around the globe.

Additionally, Latin had a great influence on both the grammar and the lexicon of West Germanic languages. Romance words make respectively 59 %, 20 % and 14 % of English, German and Dutch vocabularies. Those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch.

The Celts (, occasionally, see pronunciation of "Celtic") or Kelts were an ethnolinguistic group of tribal societies in Iron Age and Medieval Europe who spoke Celtic languages and had a similar culture, although the relationship between the ethnic, linguistic and cultural elements remains uncertain and controversial.

The earliest archaeological culture that may justifiably be considered Proto-Celtic is the Late Bronze Age Urnfield culture of Central Europe, which flourished from around 1200 BCE. Their fully Celtic descendants in central Europe were the people of the Iron Age Hallstatt culture (c. 800–450 BCE) named for the rich grave finds in Hallstatt, Austria. By the later La Tène period (c. 450 BCE up to the Roman conquest), this Celtic culture had expanded by diffusion or migration to the British Isles (Insular Celts), France and The Low Countries (Gauls), Bohemia, Poland and much of Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula (Celtiberians, Celtici and Gallaeci) and Italy (Golaseccans, Lepontii, Ligures and Cisalpine Gauls) and, following the Gallic invasion of the Balkans in 279 BCE, as far east as central Anatolia (Galatians).

The Celtic languages (usually pronounced but sometimes ) are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707.

Modern Celtic languages are mostly spoken on the northwestern edge of Europe, notably in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man, and can be found spoken on Cape Breton Island. There are also a substantial number of Welsh speakers in the Patagonia area of Argentina. Some people speak Celtic languages in the other Celtic diaspora areas of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In all these areas, the Celtic languages are now only spoken by minorities though there are continuing efforts at revitalization. Welsh is the only Celtic language not classified as "endangered" by UNESCO.

During the 1st millennium BCE, they were spoken across much of Europe, in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Atlantic and North Sea coastlines, up to the Rhine valley and down the Danube valley to the Black Sea, the northern Balkan Peninsula and in central Asia Minor. The spread to Cape Breton and Patagonia occurred in modern times. Celtic languages, particularly Irish, were spoken in Australia before federation in 1901 and are still used there to some extent.

The Balto-Slavic language group traditionally comprises the Baltic and Slavic languages, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to a period of common development. Most Indo-Europeanists classify Baltic and Slavic languages into a single branch, even though some details of the nature of their relationship remain in dispute in some circles, usually due to political controversies. Some linguists, however, have recently suggested that Balto-Slavic should be split into three equidistant nodes: Eastern Baltic, Western Baltic and Slavic.

A Proto-Balto-Slavic language is reconstructable by the comparative method, descending from Proto-Indo-European by means of well-defined sound laws, and out of which modern Slavic and Baltic languages descended. One particularly innovative dialect separated from the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum and became ancestral to the Proto-Slavic language, from which all Slavic languages descended.

The Balts or Baltic peoples (, ) are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group who speak the Baltic languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family, which was originally spoken by tribes living in the area east of the Jutland peninsula in the west and west of Moscow and the Oka and Volga rivers basins in the east. One of the features of Baltic languages is the number of conservative or archaic features retained. Among the Baltic peoples are modern Lithuanians, Latvians (including Latgalians) – all Eastern Balts – as well as the Old Prussians, Yotvingians and Galindians – the Western Balts – whose people also survived, but their languages and cultures are now extinct, and are now being assimilated into the Eastern Baltic community.

The Slavs are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group living in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, North Asia and Central Asia, who speak the Indo-European Slavic languages, and share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds. From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit most of Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Europe. Slavic groups also ventured as far as Scandinavia, constituting elements amongst the Vikings; whilst at the other geographic extreme, Slavic mercenaries fighting for the Byzantines and Arabs settled Asia Minor and even as far as Syria. Later, East Slavs (specifically, Russians and Ukrainians) colonized Siberia and Central Asia. Every Slavic ethnicity has emigrated to other parts of the world. Over half of Europe's territory is inhabited by Slavic-speaking communities.

Modern nations and ethnic groups called by the ethnonym "Slavs" are considerably diverse both genetically and culturally, and relations between them – even within the individual ethnic groups themselves – are varied, ranging from a sense of connection to mutual feelings of hostility.

Present-day Slavic people are classified into East Slavic (chiefly Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians), West Slavic (chiefly Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Wends and Sorbs), and South Slavic (chiefly Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Goranis, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes). For a more comprehensive list, see the ethnocultural subdivisions.

The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in Southeast Europe by the Thracians, the northern neighbors of the Greeks. Some authors group Thracian and Dacian into a southern Baltic linguistic family.
The Thracians inhabited a large area in southeastern Europe, including parts of the ancient provinces of Thrace, Moesia, Macedonia, Dacia, Scythia Minor, Sarmatia, Bithynia, Mysia, Pannonia, and other regions of the Balkans and Anatolia. This area extended over most of the Balkans region, and the Getae north of the Danube as far as beyond the Bug and including Panonia in the west.

The origins of the Thracians remain obscure, in the absence of written historical records. Evidence of proto-Thracians in the prehistoric period depends on artifacts of material culture. Leo Klejn identifies proto-Thracians with the multi-cordoned ware culture that was pushed away from Ukraine by the advancing timber grave culture. It is generally proposed that a proto-Thracian people developed from a mixture of indigenous peoples and Indo-Europeans from the time of Proto-Indo-European expansion in the Early Bronze Age when the latter, around 1500 BCE, mixed with indigenous peoples. We speak of proto-Thracians from which during the Iron Age (about 1000 BCE) Dacians and Thracians begin developing.

The Dacians (;, ) were an Indo-European people, part of or related to the Thracians. Dacians were the ancient inhabitants of Dacia, located in the area in and around the Carpathian Mountains and west of the Black Sea. This area includes the present-day countries of Romania and Moldova, as well as parts of Ukraine, Eastern Serbia, Northern Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary and Southern Poland.

The Dacians spoke the Dacian language, believed to have been closely related to Thracian, but were somewhat culturally influenced by the neighbouring Scythians and by the Celtic invaders of the 4th century BCE. The Dacians and Getae were always considered as Thracians by the ancients (Dio Cassius, Trogus Pompeius, Appian, Strabo and Pliny the Elder), and were both said to speak the same Thracian language.

Evidence of proto-Thracians or proto-Dacians in the prehistoric period depends on the remains of material culture. It is generally proposed that a proto-Dacian or proto-Thracian people developed from a mixture of indigenous peoples and Indo-Europeans from the time of Proto-Indo-European expansion in the Early Bronze Age (3,300–3,000 BCE) when the latter, around 1500 BCE, conquered the indigenous peoples. The indigenous people were Danubian farmers, and the invading people of the 3rd millennium BCE were Kurgan warrior-herders from the Ukrainian and Russian steppes.

Indo-Europeanization was complete by the beginning of the Bronze Age. The people of that time are best described as proto-Thracians, which later developed in the Iron Age into Danubian-Carpathian Geto-Dacians as well as Thracians of the eastern Balkan Peninsula.

The Illyrians (, "Illyrioi"; or "Illyri") were a group of Indo-European tribes in antiquity, who inhabited part of the western Balkans and the southeastern coasts of the Italian peninsula (Messapia). The territory the Illyrians inhabited came to be known as Illyria to Greek and Roman authors, who identified a territory that corresponds to the Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro, part of Serbia and most of Albania, between the Adriatic Sea in the west, the Drava river in the north, the Morava river in the east and the mouth of the Aoos river in the south. The first account of Illyrian peoples comes from the "Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax", an ancient Greek text of the middle of the 4th century BCE that describes coastal passages in the Mediterranean.

These tribes, or at least a number of tribes considered "Illyrians proper", of which only small fragments are attested enough to classify as branches of Indo-European; were probably extinct by the 2nd century CE.

The name "Illyrians", as applied by the ancient Greeks to their northern neighbors, may have referred to a broad, ill-defined group of peoples, and it is today unclear to what extent they were linguistically and culturally homogeneous. The Illyrian tribes never collectively regarded themselves as 'Illyrians', and it is unlikely that they used any collective nomenclature for themselves. The name "Illyrians" seems to be the name applied to a specific Illyrian tribe, which was the first to come in contact with the ancient Greeks during the Bronze Age, causing the name "Illyrians" to be applied to all people of similar language and customs.

Albanian ( or, meaning "Albanian language") is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.4 million people, primarily in Albania, Kosovo, the Republic of Macedonia and Greece, but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including Montenegro and Serbia (Presevo Valley). Centuries-old communities speaking Albanian-based dialects can be found scattered in Greece, southern Italy, Sicily, and Ukraine. As a result of a modern diaspora, there are also Albanian speakers elsewhere in those countries and in other parts of the world, including Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Hungary, United Kingdom, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, Canada, and the United States.

The earliest written document that mentions the Albanian language is a late 13th-century crime report from Dubrovnik. The first audio recording of the Albanian language was made by Norbert Jokl on 4 April 1914 in Vienna.

The Armenian Highland lies in the highlands surrounding Mount Ararat, the highest peak of the region. In the Bronze Age, several states flourished in the area of Greater Armenia, including the Hittite Empire (at the height of its power), Mitanni (South-Western historical Armenia), and Hayasa-Azzi (1600–1200 BCE). Soon after Hayasa-Azzi were the Nairi (1400–1000 BCE) and the Kingdom of Urartu (1000–600 BCE), who successively established their sovereignty over the Armenian Highland. Each of the aforementioned nations and tribes participated in the ethnogenesis of the Armenian people. Yerevan, the modern capital of Armenia, was founded in 782 BCE by king Argishti I.

A minority view also suggests that the Indo-European homeland may have been located in the Armenian Highland.

Hellenic is the branch of the Indo-European language family that includes the different varieties of Greek. In traditional classifications, Hellenic consists of Greek alone, but some linguists group Greek together with various ancient languages thought to have been closely related or distinguish varieties of Greek that are distinct enough to be considered separate languages.

The Proto-Greeks, who spoke the predecessor of the Mycenaean language, are mostly placed in the Early Helladic period in Greece (early 3rd millennium BCE; circa 3200 BCE) towards the end of the Neolithic in Southern Europe.

In the 13th century BCE, at the end of the Bronze Age, seafaring invaders from Europe and the Aegean, known as the Sea Peoples, entered the Eastern Mediterranean, invading Anatolia, Syria, Canaan, Cyprus and Egypt. The invasions by the Sea Peoples ushered the Bronze Age Collapse, which resulted in the cultural collapse of Mycenean Greece, the Hittite Empire, the New Kingdom of Egypt and the civilizations of Canaan and Syria. The Sea Peoples are regarded as being composed of various groups of Indo-European and non-Indo-European peoples.

Groups of the Sea Peoples mentioned in Egyptian documents are the Ekwesh, a group of Bronze Age Greeks (Achaeans, called "Ahhiyawa" in Hittite texts); Teresh ("Tyrsenoi"), known to later Greeks as sailors and pirates from Anatolia, ancestors of the Etruscans; Luka, an Anatolian coastal people of western Anatolia, also known from Hittite sources (their name survives in classical Lycia on the southwest coast of Anatolia); Sherden, probably Sardinians (the Sherden acted as mercenaries of the Egyptians in the Battle of Kadesh, 1299 BCE); Shekelesh, probably identical with the Italic tribe called Siculi; and Peleset, generally believed to refer to the Philistines, who perhaps came from Crete and were the only major tribe of the Sea Peoples to settle permanently in Palestine.

The Phrygians (gr. Φρύγες, "Phrúges" or "Phrýges") were an ancient Indo-European people. After the collapse of the Hittite Empire at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE, the political vacuum in central-western Anatolia was filled by a wave of Indo-European migrants and "Sea Peoples", including the Phrygians, who established their kingdom with a capital eventually at Gordium. It is presently unknown whether the Phrygians were actively involved in the collapse of the Hittite capital Hattusa or whether they simply moved into the vacuum left by the collapse of Hittite hegemony.

The Phrygian language was the language spoken by the Phrygians in Asia Minor during Classical Antiquity (ca. 8th century BCE to 5th century CE). Phrygian is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek. The similarity of some Phrygian words to Greek ones was observed by Plato in his "Cratylus" (410a). However, Eric P. Hamp suggests that Phrygian was related to Italo-Celtic in a hypothetical "Northwest Indo-European" group.

According to Herodotus, the Phrygians were initially dwelling in the southern Balkans under the name of Bryges (Briges), changing it to Phruges after their final migration to Anatolia, via the Hellespont. Though the migration theory is still defended by many modern historians, most archaeologists have abandoned the migration hypothesis regarding the origin of the Phrygians due to a lack substantial archaeological evidence, with the migration theory resting only on the accounts of Herodotus and Xanthus.

From tribal and village beginnings, the state of Phrygia arose in the eighth century BCE with its capital at Gordium. During this period, the Phrygians extended eastward and encroached upon the kingdom of Urartu, the descendants of the Hurrians, a former rival of the Hittites. Meanwhile, the Phrygian Kingdom was overwhelmed by Cimmerian invaders around 690 BCE, then briefly conquered by its neighbour Lydia, before it passed successively into the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and the empire of Alexander and his successors, was taken by the Attalids of Pergamon, and eventually became part of the Roman Empire. The last mention of the Phrygian language in literature dates to the fifth century CE and it was likely extinct by the seventh century.

Indo-Iranian peoples are a grouping of ethnic groups consisting of the Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Dardic and Nuristani peoples; that is, speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family.

The Proto-Indo-Iranians are commonly identified with the Sintashta culture and the subsequent Andronovo culture within the broader Andronovo horizon, and their homeland with an area of the Eurasian steppe that borders the Ural River on the west, the Tian Shan on the east.

The Indo-Iranians interacted with the Bactria-Margiana Culture, also called "Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex". Proto-Indo-Iranian arose due to this influence. The Indo-Iranians also borrowed their distinctive religious beliefs and practices from this culture.

The Indo-Iranian migrations took place in two waves. The first wave consisted of the Indo-Aryan migration into the Levant, founding the Mittani kingdom, and a migration south-eastward of the Vedic people, over the Hindu Kush into northern India. The Indo-Aryans split-off around 1800–1600 BCE from the Iranians, where-after they were defeated and split into two groups by the Iranians, who dominated the Central Eurasian steppe zone and "chased [the Indo-Aryans] to the extremities of Central Eurasia". One group were the Indo-Aryans who founded the Mitanni kingdom in northern Syria; (c. 1500–1300 BCE) the other group were the Vedic people. Christopher I. Beckwith suggests that the Wusun, an Indo-European Caucasian people of Inner Asia in antiquity, were also of Indo-Aryan origin.

The second wave is interpreted as the Iranian wave, and took place in the third stage of the Indo-European migrations from 800 BCE onwards.

The Sintashta culture, also known as the Sintashta-Petrovka culture or Sintashta-Arkaim culture, is a Bronze Age archaeological culture of the northern Eurasian steppe on the borders of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, dated to the period 2100–1800 BCE. It is probably the archaeological manifestation of the Indo-Iranian language group.

The Sintashta culture emerged from the interaction of two antecedent cultures. Its immediate predecessor in the Ural-Tobol steppe was the Poltavka culture, an offshoot of the cattle-herding Yamnaya horizon that moved east into the region between 2800 and 2600 BCE. Several Sintashta towns were built over older Poltavka settlements or close to Poltavka cemeteries, and Poltavka motifs are common on Sintashta pottery. Sintashta material culture also shows the influence of the late Abashevo culture, a collection of Corded Ware settlements in the forest steppe zone north of the Sintashta region that were also predominantly pastoralist. Allentoft et al. (2015) also found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture.

The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials, and the culture is considered a strong candidate for the origin of the technology, which spread throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient warfare. Sintashta settlements are also remarkable for the intensity of copper mining and bronze metallurgy carried out there, which is unusual for a steppe culture.

Because of the difficulty of identifying the remains of Sintashta sites beneath those of later settlements, the culture was only recently distinguished from the Andronovo culture. It is now recognised as a separate entity forming part of the 'Andronovo horizon'.

The Andronovo culture is a collection of similar local Bronze Age Indo-Iranian cultures that flourished c. 1800–900 BCE in western Siberia and the west Asiatic steppe. It is probably better termed an archaeological complex or archaeological horizon. The name derives from the village of Andronovo (), where in 1914, several graves were discovered, with skeletons in crouched positions, buried with richly decorated pottery. The older Sintashta culture (2100–1800), formerly included within the Andronovo culture, is now considered separately, but regarded as its predecessor, and accepted as part of the wider Andronovo horizon. At least four sub-cultures of the Andronovo horizon have been distinguished, during which the culture expands towards the south and the east:

The geographical extent of the culture is vast and difficult to delineate exactly. On its western fringes, it overlaps with the approximately contemporaneous, but distinct, Srubna culture in the Volga-Ural interfluvial. To the east, it reaches into the Minusinsk depression, with some sites as far west as the southern Ural Mountains, overlapping with the area of the earlier Afanasevo culture. Additional sites are scattered as far south as the Koppet Dag (Turkmenistan), the Pamir (Tajikistan) and the Tian Shan (Kyrgyzstan). The northern boundary vaguely corresponds to the beginning of the Taiga. In the Volga basin, interaction with the Srubna culture was the most intense and prolonged, and Federovo style pottery is found as far west as Volgograd.

Most researchers associate the Andronovo horizon with early Indo-Iranian languages, though it may have overlapped the early Uralic-speaking area at its northern fringe.

The Bactria-Margiana Culture, also called "Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex" (BMAC), was a non-Indo-European culture which influenced the Indo-European groups of the second stage of the Indo-European migrations. It was centered in what is nowadays northwestern Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan, and had an elaborate trade-network reachings as far as the Indus civilisation, the Iranian plateau, and the Persian Gulf. Finds within BMAC sites include an Elamite-type cylinder seal and a Harappan seal stamped with an elephant and Indus script found at Gonur-depe.

Proto-Indo-Iranian arose due to this BMAC-influence. The Indo-Iranians also borrowed their distinctive religious beliefs and practices from this culture. According to Anthony, the Old Indic religion probably emerged among Indo-European immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan River (present-day Uzbekistan) and (present-day) Iran. It was "a syncretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo-European elements", which borrowed "distinctive religious beliefs and practices" from the Bactria–Margiana Culture. At least 383 non-Indo-European words were borrowed from this culture, including the god Indra and the ritual drink Soma.

"Mitanni" (Hittite cuneiform ), also "Mittani" () or "Hanigalbat" (Assyrian "Hanigalbat, Khanigalbat" cuneiform ) or "Naharin" in ancient Egyptian texts was an Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria and south-east Anatolia from c. 1500–1300 BCE. Founded by an Indo-Aryan ruling class governing a predominantly Hurrian population, Mitanni came to be a regional power after the Hittite destruction of Amorite Babylon and a series of ineffectual Assyrian kings created a power vacuum in Mesopotamia.

At the beginning of its history, Mitanni's major rival was Egypt under the Thutmosids. However, with the ascent of the Hittite empire, Mitanni and Egypt made an alliance to protect their mutual interests from the threat of Hittite domination. At the height of its power, during the 14th century BCE, Mitanni had outposts centered around its capital, Washukanni, whose location has been determined by archaeologists to be on the headwaters of the Khabur River. Eventually, Mitanni succumbed to Hittite and later Assyrian attacks, and was reduced to the status of a province of the Middle Assyrian Empire.

Their sphere of influence is shown in Hurrian place names, personal names and the spread through Syria and the Levant of a distinct pottery type.

The Indo-Aryan peoples started to migrate into northwestern India around 1500 BCE, as a slow diffusion during the Late Harappan period, establishing the Vedic religion during the Vedic period (c. 1500–500 BCE).

The research on the Indo-Aryan migrations began with the study of the Rig Veda in the mid-19th century by Max Muller, and gradually evolved from a theory of a large scale invasion of a racially and technologically superior people to being a slow diffusion of small numbers of nomadic people that had a disproportionate societal impact on a large urban population. Contemporary claims of Indo-Aryan migrations are drawn from linguistic, archaeological, literary and cultural sources.

During the early part of the Vedic period, the Indo-Aryans settled into northern India, bringing with them their specific religious traditions. The associated culture was initially a tribal, pastoral society centred in the northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent; it spread after 1200 BCE to the Ganges Plain, as it was shaped by increasing settled agriculture, a hierarchy of four social classes, and the emergence of monarchical, state-level polities.

The end of the Vedic period witnessed the rise of large, urbanized states as well as of shramana movements (including Jainism and Buddhism) which challenged the Vedic orthodoxy. Around the beginning of the Common Era, the Vedic tradition formed one of the main constituents of the so-called "Hindu synthesis"

According to Christopher I. Beckwith the Wusun, an Indo-European Caucasian people of Inner Asia in antiquity, were also of Indo-Aryan origin. From the Chinese term Wusun, Beckwith reconstructs the Old Chinese *âswin, which he compares to the Old Indic aśvin "the horsemen", the name of the Rigvedic twin equestrian gods. Beckwith suggests that the Wusun were an eastern remnant of the Indo-Aryans, who had been suddenly pushed to the extremeties of the Eurasian Steppe by the Iranian peoples in the 2nd millennium BCE.

The Wusun are first mentioned by Chinese sources as vassals in the Tarim Basin of the Yuezhi, another Indo-European Caucasian people of possible Tocharian stock. Around 175 BCE, the Yuezhi were utterly defeated by the Xiongnu, also former vassals of the Yuezhi. The Yuezhi subsequently attacked the Wusun and killed their king (Kunmo or Kunmi ) Nandoumi (), capturing the Ili Valley from the Saka (Scythians) shortly afterwards. In return the Wusun settled in the former territories of the Yuezhi as vassals of the Xiongnu.

The son of Nandoumi was adopted by the Xiongnu king and made leader of the Wusun. Around 130 BCE he attacked and utterly defeated the Yuezhi, settling the Wusun in the Ili Valley.

After the Yuezhi were defeated by the Xiongnu, in the 2nd century BCE, a small group, known as the Little Yuezhi, fled to the south, while the majority migrated west to the Ili Valley, where they displaced the Sakas (Scythians). Driven from the Ili Valley shortly afterwards by the Wusun, the Yuezhi migrated to Sogdia and then Bactria, where they are often identified with the "Tokhárioi" (Τοχάριοι) and "Asioi" of Classical sources. They then expanded into northern South Asia, where one branch of the Yuezhi founded the Kushan Empire. The Kushan empire stretched from Turfan in the Tarim Basin to Pataliputra on the Gangetic plain at its greatest extent, and played an important role in the development of the Silk Road and the transmission of Buddhism to China.

Soon after 130 BCE the Wusun became independent of the Xiongnu, becoming trusted vassals of the Han Dynasty and powerful force in the region for centuries. With the emerging steppe federations of the Rouran, the Wusun migrated into the Pamir Mountains in the 5th century CE. They are last mentioned in 938 when a Wusun chieftain paid tribute to the Liao dynasty.

The Indo-European eastward expansion in the 2nd millennium BCE had a significant influence on Chinese culture, introducing the chariot, horse burials, the domesticated horse, iron technology, and wheeled vehicles, fighting styles, head-and-hoof rituals, art motifs and myths.

The appearance of the Kassites in Mesopotamia in the 18th century BCE has been connected to the contemporary Indo-European expansion into the region at the time.

The Kassites gained control of Babylonia after the Hittite sack of the city in 1595 BCE (i.e. 1531 BCE per the short chronology), and established a dynasty based in Dur-Kurigalzu. The Kassites were members of a small military aristocracy but were efficient rulers and not locally unpopular. The horse, which the Kassites worshipped, first came into use in Babylonia at this time. The Kassites were polytheistic, and the name of some 30 gods are known.

The Kassite language has not been classified. However, several Kassite leaders bore Indo-European names, and the Kassites worshipped several Indo-Aryan gods, suggesting that the Kassites were under significant Indo-European influence. The reign of the Kassites laid the essential groundwork for the development of subsequent Babylonian culture.

The migration of the Hyksos from the Levant to Egypt in the 18th century BCE has been connected to the contemporary Indo-European expansion into the Middle East at the time.

Beginning around 1630 BCE, the Hyksos, possibly related to the Amorites, seized control of Egypt, establishing their Fifteenth Dynasty with its capital at Avaris. Although vilified in later Egyptian texts, the Hyksos became highly Egyptianized and ruled as pharaohs listed as legitimate kings in the Turin Papyrus. The Hyksos capital was seized around 1521 BCE by the Theban Ahmose, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and the Hyksos were expelled. The Hyksos may have been related to the later Habiru, etymologically connected to the term Hebrew.

The Hyksos practiced horse burials, and their chief deity, their native storm god, became associated with the Egyptian storm and desert god, Seth. Although most Hyksos names seem Semitic, the Hyksos also included Hurrians, who, while speaking an isolated language, were under the rule and influence of Indo-Aryans.

The Hyksos brought several technical improvements to Egypt, as well as cultural infusions such as new musical instruments and foreign loan words. The changes introduced include new techniques of bronze working and pottery, new breeds of animals, and new crops. In warfare, they introduced the horse and chariot, the composite bow, improved battle axes, and advanced fortification techniques. Because of these cultural advances, Hyksos rule brought Egypt out of its technological backwardness and was decisive for Egypt's later empire in the Middle East.

In the mid-2nd millennium BCE, control of the Levant was seized by people known as Maryannu in Akkadian texts. Many of these intruders had Indo-Aryan names. The Amarna letters show that in the early 14th century BCE, most of the important cities of Palestine and Syria were controlled by men of either Indo-Aryan or Hurrian (who were under Indo-Aryan rule and influence at the time) names. Among the Indo-Aryan rulers of Palestine mentioned in the Amarna letters we find Induruta as lord of Achshaph, Biridiya as lord of Megiddo, Widia as lord of Ashkelon, Shuwardata as lord of Hebron, Zatatna and Surata as lords of Acre, Biryawaza as lord of Damascus, and other places, while Abdu-Heba, lord of Jerusalem has a Hurrian name.

The Iranian peoples (also known as Iranic peoples) are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group that comprise the speakers of Iranian languages. Their historical areas of settlement were on the Iranian plateau (mainly Iran, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan) and certain neighbouring areas of Asia (such as parts of the Caucasus, Eastern Turkey, Northeast Syria, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Bahrain, Oman, northern Iraq, Northwestern and Western Pakistan) reflecting changing geopolitical range of the Persian empires and the Iranian history.

The Medes, Parthians and Persians begin to appear on the western Iranian plateau from c. 800 BCE, after which they remained under Assyrian rule for several centuries, as it was with the rest of the peoples in the Near East. The Achaemenids replaced Median rule from 559 BCE. Around the first millennium CE, the Kambojas, the Pashtuns and the Baloch began to settle on the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau, on the mountainous frontier of northwestern and western Pakistan, displacing the earlier Indo-Aryans from the area.

Their current distribution spreads across the Iranian plateau, and stretches from the Caucasus in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south, and from the Indus River in the east to eastern Turkey in the west – a region that is sometimes called the "Iranian cultural continent", or Greater Iran by some scholars, and represents the extent of the Iranian languages and significant influence of the Iranian peoples, through the geopolitical reach of the Iranian empire.

The Iranians comprise the present day Persians, Lurs, Ossetians, Kurds, Pashtuns, Balochs, Tajiks and their sub-groups of the historic Medes, Massagetaes, Sarmatians, Scythians, Parthians, Alans, Bactrians, Soghdians and other people of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Iranian plateau. Another possible group are the Cimmerians who are mostly supposed to have been related to either Iranian or Thracian speaking groups, or at least to have been ruled by an Iranian elite.

The first Iranians to reach the Black Sea may have been the Cimmerians in the 8th century BCE, although their linguistic affiliation is uncertain. They were followed by the Scythians, who would dominate the area, at their height, from the Carpathian Mountains in the west, to the eastern-most fringes of Central Asia in the east, including the Indo-Scythian Kingdom in India. For most of their existence, they were based in what is modern-day Ukraine and southern European Russia.

Sarmatian tribes, of whom the best known are the Roxolani (Rhoxolani), Iazyges (Jazyges) and the Alani (Alans), followed the Scythians westwards into Europe in the late centuries BCE and the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Common Era (The Age of Migrations). The populous Sarmatian tribe of the Massagetae, dwelling near the Caspian Sea, were known to the early rulers of Persia in the Achaemenid Period. In the east, the Saka occupied several areas in Xinjiang, from Khotan to Tumshuq.

In Central Asia, the Turkic languages have marginalized Iranian languages as a result of the Turkic expansion of the early centuries CE. In Eastern Europe, Slavic and Germanic peoples assimilated and absorbed the native Iranian languages (Scythian and Sarmatian) of the region. Extant major Iranian languages are Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, and Balochi, besides numerous smaller ones.

The Anatolian hypothesis proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. The hypothesis suggests that the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) lived in Anatolia during the Neolithic era, and associates the distribution of historical Indo-European languages with the expansion during the Neolithic revolution during the 7th and 6th millennia BCE. The alternative and more academically favored view is the Kurgan hypothesis.

The main proponent of the Anatolian hypothesis was Colin Renfrew, who in 1987 suggested a peaceful Indo-Europeanization of Europe from Anatolia from around 7000 BCE with the advance of farming by demic diffusion ("wave of advance"). Accordingly, most of the inhabitants of Neolithic Europe would have spoken Indo-European languages, and later migrations would at best have replaced these Indo-European varieties with other Indo-European varieties.

The main strength of the farming hypothesis lies in its linking of the spread of Indo-European languages with an archaeologically known event (the spread of farming) that is often assumed as involving significant population shifts.

The "Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm" is a hypothesis suggesting that the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic, several millennia earlier than the Chalcolithic or at the most Neolithic estimates in other scenarios of Proto-Indo-European origins. Its main proponents are Marcel Otte, Alexander Häusler, and Mario Alinei.

The PCT posits that the advent of Indo-European languages should be linked to the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia from Africa in the Upper Paleolithic. Employing "lexical periodization", Alinei arrives at a timeline deeper than even that of Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis.

Since 2004, an informal workgroup of scholars who support the Paleolithic Continuity hypothesis has been held online. Apart from Alinei himself, its leading members (referred to as "Scientific Committee" in the website) are linguists Xaverio Ballester (University of Valencia) and Francesco Benozzo (University of Bologna). Also included are prehistorian Marcel Otte (Université de Liège) and anthropologist Henry Harpending (University of Utah).

It is not listed by Mallory among the proposals for the origins of the Indo-European languages that are widely discussed and considered credible within academia.

The notion of "indigenous Aryans" posits that speakers of Indo-Aryan languages are "indigenous" to the Indian subcontinent. Scholars like Jim G. Shaffer and B. B. Lal note the absence of archaeological remains of an Aryan "conquest", and the high degree of physical continuity between Harappan and Post-Harappan society. They support the controversial hypothesis that the Indo-Aryan civilization was not introduced by Aryan migrations, but originated in pre-Vedic India.

In recent years, the concept of "indigenous Aryans" has been increasingly conflated with an "Out of India" origin of the Indo-European language family. This contrasts with the model of Indo-Aryan migration which posits that Indo-Aryan tribes migrated to India from Central Asia. Some furthermore claim that all Indo-European languages originated in India. These claims remain problematic.