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German speaking minorities live in many countries and on all five continents: the countries of the former Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Belgium, the USA, Latin America, Namibia, 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.
Amongst 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), groups that have been greatly “folklorised” and almost completely linguistically assimilated (such as the Germans in the USA or Australia), and others, such as the true linguistic minorities (like the German minorities in 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 Altai 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).
Latin America
At least one million German speakers live in Latin America. There are German speaking minorities in almost every South American and Central American country, including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, 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 begun. German emigration to the Americas totaled 200,000 people during the eighteenth century. During the 1880's, 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 USA. Although the USA was the focal point for emigration in the 19th century, emigration to Latin America was also significant for differing economic and political reasons.
90% of German Latin American emigrants in the 19th century went to the five Cono Sur countries: Brazil, Argentinia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile.
See also
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