Countries With the Most German Speakers

Native means just that it's their mother tongue, not that they're native to the area.

Most German speaking Poles are located in the south west -- Silesia/Wroclaw.

My grandma was born in Silesia during WWII with German as her first language. Her mother admonished her to speak Polish after the war had ended, or else the Russians would come and apply a lock to her mouth. When she moved to Germany much later as an adult, she had to learn German like a second language, even though it was technically her first. The German which my old relatives spoke was rather old-fashioned because it was isolated from the main community of speakers. It was quite adorable and I liked to hear it.

There were so many Germans in pre-war boundaries of modern Poland, that, despite the fact that most of them either fled or were forcefully resettled, those few who stayed were still in significant enough numbers to make this quiz. The Opole Voivodenship for some reason was the area where a lot of Germans were allowed to stay. According to the 2002 census, 10% of the entire Voivodenship was of German ethinicity. I guess there were many people of mixed descent around 1945 in there as it was a mixed Polish-German area, so it was harder for the authorities to determine who was Polish and who was German, unlike in areas that had a clear German majority and they could just resettle everyone.

I assume most of those would've integrated to primarily be Spanish-speaking after the past 2 (3?) generations.

I know Argentinians who have retained their German. (And OT, but others who also retained their Korean.)

I am skeptical that no South American country makes the list, considering both German immigration and also the Mennonite populations. I have heard about entire Brazilian communities that use the German language, and 70,000 isn't too high a benchmark to beat, although language data from some of those countries can be incomplete.

I guessed that one as well. The qualifier is probably "native language". It may be that not that many have German as a native language, most probably being second-language speakers after Portuguese.

Just from my personal experience. In my in-laws neighborhood which is in a smallish village that's part of a slightly larger city 50 km northeast of Frankfurt I'd say a good 10 percent is Turkish and speak Turkish as their native tongue. Go to one of the public pools even in the tiny villages up in the hills and a good 10 to 15% are speaking something other than German. Lots of Polish and Russian. This isn't even taking into account the large ethnic neighborhoods that are in all of the major cities. Anywhere there is prosperity and an aging population their are going to be young immigrants looking for menial work.

Less than 40.000 inhabitants

Maybe but they have a smaller population than the last number on this list.

Why?

most speak dutch and the few that speak german is too little