Ethnic Germans can be found all over the world, in countries such as the former Soviet Union, the United States, South Africa, Israel, Australia, and Latin America, spread across every inhabited continent. Though far from their country of origin and spread out across the world, these German speaking minorities exhibit a great deal of uniformity with regard to their relationship to the majority community, their cultural identity, and their demographics. They range in size from small communities, such as the German speaking presence in Nambia, to very large groups”nearly 1 million living in Russia and Kazakhstan, and have assimilated into their host cultures to differing degrees. Many German speaking peoples identify strongly with their cultural heritage, and seek to preserve it for future generations.

Many German speaking peoples have immigrated to countries in Latin America, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Before this, the German presence in these countries was very small, with immigration for all of the eighteenth century totaling a mere 200,000 people. However, during the nineteenth century, German immigrants began flooding into South America, and by 1906, an estimate in The Germans Abroad Handbook put the population of German speaking peoples in South America at over 2 million people. Many of these new immigrants settled in the Cono Sur countries, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chile with immigration to Brazil tapering off when new laws made relocating there more difficult. During the Second World War, when the Nazis held power in Germany, many German speaking peoples who were Jewish relocated to South America before a ban on immigration was passed in Germany in 1941. These immigrants found themselves susceptible to many of the same forms of assimilation as other immigrant groups, and they began to transition away from German as the language of their communities. The desire to fit in with the majority of society in their new countries led many German speaking peoples to abandon their native language. Many Germans tended to settle in areas of South America with a high population density, and as a result, many of today’s generation of ethnic Germans no longer speak their native language fluently.

The Australian government estimates that the population of German speaking peoples living there is somewhere around 75,600, which constitutes the fourth largest ethnic group in the nation. These immigrants primarily settled in South Australia and Queensland, where Barossa German, a dialect named for the Barossa Valley, developed. The Australian government enacted measures to suppress the speaking of German during the World Wars, and as a result, German as a spoken language experienced a sharp decline.