Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: How many people are native German speakers?
Mostly depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties with a disputed status as separate languages (e.g., Low German/Plautdietsch[1]), it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language,[2][3][4] 10-25 million as a second language,[2][3] and 75–100 million as a foreign language.[2][5] This would imply approximately 175-220 million German speakers worldwide.[6]
Germanicist John A. Hawkins sets forth the arguments for a Germanic substrate. Hawkins argues that the Proto-Germans encountered a non-Indo-European speaking people and borrowed many features from their language. He hypothesizes that the first sound shift of Grimm's Law was the result of non-native speakers attempting to pronounce Indo-European sounds and that they resorted to the closest sounds in their own language in their attempt to pronounce them. The battle-axe people are an ancient culture identified by archaeology who have been proposed as candidates for the people who influenced Germanic with their non-Indo-European speech. However, the culture was spread through a wider range of regions across Eastern and Central Europe, already close to or in contact with areas inhabited by Indo-European speakers and their putative area of origin, and none of the Indo-European proto-languages thus produced or their succeeding languages developed along the much larger line of extension of the battle-axe people (Celto-Italic, Illyrian, Slavic, Baltic and others) appear to have been affected by the same changes that are limited to the Proto-Germanic. 
How a Catalan speaker's Spanish manifests depends heavily on individual sociolinguistic variables related to age, native language, and the differing environments of language use. It is therefore not a uniform variety with little variation. Many of the features listed below are present with very different frequencies in different speakers, and some of the features could be absent in many speakers (particularly those whose main native language is Spanish, who transfer fewer typical Catalan features).
Bern has a population () of . , 15.0% of the population are resident foreign nationals. Over the last 4 years (2010–2014) the population has changed at a rate of 3.0%. Most of the population () speaks German (804,190 or 84.0%) as their first language, French is the second most common (72,646 or 7.6%) and Italian is the third (18,908 or 2.0%). There are 688 people who speak Romansh. Based on the new methodology of the 2014 census, the percentage of German native speakers increased to 85.1%, French speakers increased to 10.4% as did Italian speakers to 3.1%. The number of Romansh speakers was too small to accurately estimate, but was around 0.1%. The census also reported that 2.9% of the population speaks English as their native language. Respondents could choose up to three native languages, leading to a total above 100%.
The countries in which English is spoken can be grouped into different categories by how English is used in each country. The "inner circle" countries with many native speakers of English share an international standard of written English and jointly influence speech norms of English around the world. English does not belong to just one country, and it does not belong solely to descendants of English settlers. English is an official language of countries populated by few descendants of native speakers of English. It has also become by far the most important language of international communication when people who share no native language meet anywhere in the world.
The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360-400 million native speakers;[3][nb 2] German, with over 100 million native speakers;[4] and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers;[5] 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[6][7][8] (at least 5 million in Germany[6] and 1.7 million in the Netherlands);[9] Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe[10] 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.
German incorporates a significant number of loanwords from other languages. Loanwords are often adapted to German phonology but to varying degrees, depending on the speaker and the commonness of the word. and do not occur in native German words but are common in a number of French and English loan words. Many speakers replace them with and respectively (especially in Southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland), so that (from English "jungle") can be pronounced or . Some speakers in Northern and Western Germany merge with , so that (phonemically ) can be pronounced , or . The realization of as , however, is uncommon.
The total number of native Dutch speakers is estimated to be about 6.23 million, concentrated in the northern Flanders region, while native French speakers number 3.32 million in Wallonia and an estimated 870,000 (or 85%) in the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. The German-speaking Community is made up of 73,000 people in the east of the Walloon Region; around 10,000 German and 60,000 Belgian nationals are speakers of German. Roughly 23,000 more German speakers live in municipalities near the official Community.
Operation Corona was a Royal Air Force (RAF) initiative to confuse German nightfighters during RAF bomber raids on German cities during World War II. Both native speakers and people who could speak German to a standard where they could be taken for a native speaker impersonated German Air Defence officers. They initiated communications via radio with German nightfighter pilots and countermanded previously given orders, thus reducing the efficiency of German air defence.
Native Moravians speak Moravian dialects of the Czech language, and the dialects native to this region are influenced by neighboring Slovak speakers, hence the name "Moravian Slovakia." Due to these cultural and linguistic links to Slovakia, many ethnographers until the 20th century used to consider Moravian Slovaks as a people which politically belonged to Moravia and the Bohemian Crown but ethnographically and culturally to the Slovak ethnic group. Historically, there were also significant numbers of German speakers who also influenced local speech.
Native Esperanto speakers (Esperanto: "denaskuloj" or "denaskaj esperantistoj") are people who have acquired Esperanto as one of their native languages. As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there were around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children in 2004. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents. In all but a handful of cases, it was the father who used Esperanto with the child. In the majority of such families, the parents had the same native language, though in many the parents had different native languages, and only Esperanto in common.
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.
In linguistics, the term near-native speakers is used for people who are "highly proficient speakers who are distinguishable from native speakers, but only in small ways." Analysis of native and near-native speakers indicates that they differ in their underlying grammar and intuition, meaning that they do not interpret grammatical contrasts the same way. However, this divergence typically does not impact a near-native speaker's regular usage of the language.
English is the third most-spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish. It is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. There are more people who have learned it as a second language than there are native speakers. English is the most commonly spoken language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, and it is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia. It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union and many other world and regional international organisations. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch. English has a vast vocabulary, though counting how many words any language has is impossible. English speakers are called "Anglophones".
Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic language spoken natively by 9.6 million people, predominantly in Sweden (as the sole official language), and in parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to some extent with Danish, although the degree of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker. Both Norwegian and Danish are generally easier for Swedish speakers to read than to listen to because of difference in accent and tone when speaking. Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It has the most speakers of the North Germanic languages. 
There are also attempts being made in a few communities to teach the dialect in a classroom setting; however, as every year passes by, fewer and fewer in these particular communities speak the dialect. There is still a weekly radio program in the dialect whose audience is made up mostly of these diverse groups, and many Lutheran and Reformed congregations in Pennsylvania that formerly used German have a yearly service in Pennsylvania German. Other non-native speakers of the dialect include those persons that regularly do business with native speakers.
Many English words are used in German, especially in technology and pop culture. Some speakers pronounce them similarly to their native pronunciation, but many speakers change non-native phonemes to similar German phonemes (even if they pronounce them in a rather English manner in an English-language setting):
Like many German international schools, the Abuja school is smaller than other international schools in the area because it targets German citizens and native speakers of German, and it only accepts small numbers of students who do not natively speak German. It was scheduled to begin offering an English language stream in 2017.
Germanic toponyms are the names given to places by Germanic peoples and tribes. Besides areas with current speakers of Germanic languages, many regions with previous Germanic speakers or Germanic influence had or still have Germanic toponymic elements, such as places in Northern France, Wallonia, Poland and Northern Italy.
Braj Kachru distinguishes countries where English is spoken with a three circles model. In his model, the "inner circle" countries are countries with large communities of native speakers of English, "outer circle" countries have small communities of native speakers of English but widespread use of English as a second language in education or broadcasting or for local official purposes, and "expanding circle" countries are countries where many learners learn English as a foreign language. Kachru bases his model on the history of how English spread in different countries, how users acquire English, and the range of uses English has in each country. The three circles change membership over time.
Countries with large communities of native speakers of English (the inner circle) include Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where a significant minority speaks English. The countries with the most native English speakers are, in descending order, the United States (at least 231 million), the United Kingdom (60 million), Canada (19 million), Australia (at least 17 million), South Africa (4.8 million), Ireland (4.2 million), and New Zealand (3.7 million). In these countries, children of native speakers learn English from their parents, and local people who speak other languages or new immigrants learn English to communicate in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. The inner-circle countries provide the base from which English spreads to other countries in the world.
It was not until the 19th century that other European languages began to use words related to "Czechs" (as in English, "Tschechien" in German, "Tchèques" in French) in a deliberate (and successful) attempt to distinguish between ethnic Slavic-speaking Bohemians and other inhabitants of Bohemia. The latter were mostly ethnic Germans, who identified as "German Bohemians" ("Deutschböhmen") or simply as "Bohemians" ("Böhmen"). In many parts of Europe, state citizenship was not identical with ethnicity and language, and the various peoples were usually identified by their language. Ethnic boundaries in Bohemia were not always sharp, and people very often were bilingual. Intermarriages across language borders were also common. Native Czech speakers often spoke German and many native German speakers spoke Czech with varying fluency, particularly in areas with many Czech speakers.
Many users of English in the expanding circle use it to communicate with other people from the expanding circle, so that interaction with native speakers of English plays no part in their decision to use English. Non-native varieties of English are widely used for international communication, and speakers of one such variety often encounter features of other varieties. Very often today a conversation in English anywhere in the world may include no native speakers of English at all, even while including speakers from several different countries.
Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world,[27] roughly 80million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80million 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.[note 4] Thus, the total number of Germans lies somewhere between 100 and more than 150 million, depending on the criteria applied[1] (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).
The village counts about 200 inhabitants, whose main sources of livelihood are reindeer husbandry and tourism. The area is extremely valuable for bird-watchers and there are relatively important hiking paths.
The municipality has four official languages: Finnish, Inari Sami (ca. 400 estimated speakers), Skolt Sami (ca. 400 speakers), and Northern Sami (ca. 700 speakers). The estimates of how many people have some command of each of the Sami languages differ from the number of people who list them as their mother tongues. Of the total population of 6,863 in 2010, 6,366 people registered Finnish as their mother tongue and 400 one of the Sami languages. 97 inhabitants were native speakers of other languages.
According to the history laid out in H. Glenn Penny's "Kindred By Choice", many Germans identify their roots as tribes that lived independently of one another that were colonized by Romans and forced to become Christians. Because of this distant tribal background and history of colonization, and in fact all ancient Europeans lived tribally at some point in their history, many of these Germans identify with Native Americans more than European nations in contemporary times. This belief in kindred lifestyle is detailed in Penny's in-depth study of German fascination with and performances as their ideas of historical Native American peoples. These Germans are also interested in depiction of Native Americans in art and anthropology. Penny covers this history in "Kindred By Choice" and other published writings, chronicling German artists such as Rudolf Cronau, Max Ernst, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter's portrayals of Native Americans. German academics such as Alexander von Humboldt, Karl von den Steinen, Paul Ehrenreich, and Carl Jung all traveled to the United States to learn more about Native Americans. Their documentation of their journeys were regarded positively by the German public and assisted in fostering German fascination with Native Americans. Penny also details how Germans often denounced the violence inflicted upon Native peoples by the United States government.