Linguistic Minorities
About 92% of the population spoke German as their first language. The only minority language with a significant number of speakers (5.4%) was Polish (a figure that rises to over 6% when including Kashubian, Masurian, and other forms classified by the Imperial government as separate languages but today more often considered variants of Polish).
The non-German Germanic languages language group (0.5%) like Danish, Dutch and Frisian were located in the north and northwest of the empire, near the borders with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Low German was spoken throughout northern Germany and, though linguistically as separate from High German (Hochdeutsch) as from Dutch and English, is considered "German", hence also its name. Danish and Frisian were spoken predominantly in the north of the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein and Dutch in the western border areas of the Prussia—that is, Hanover, Westphalia and the Rhine Province.
Polish and other Slavic languages (6.28%) were spoken chiefly in the east.
A few (0.5%) spoke French, especially in the Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen, where French-speakers formed 11.6% of the total population.
| Language | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| German | 51,883,131 | 92.05 |
| German and a foreign language | 252,918 | 0.45 |
| Polish | 3,086,489 | 5.48 |
| French | 211,679 | 0.38 |
| Masurian | 142,049 | 0.25 |
| Danish | 141,061 | 0.25 |
| Lithuanian | 106,305 | 0.19 |
| Kashubian | 100,213 | 0.18 |
| Wendish (Sorbian) | 93,032 | 0.16 |
| Dutch | 80,361 | 0.14 |
| Italian | 65,930 | 0.12 |
| Moravian | 64,382 | 0.11 |
| Czech | 43,016 | 0.08 |
| Frisian | 20,677 | 0.04 |
| English | 20,217 | 0.04 |
| Russian | 9,617 | 0.02 |
| Swedish | 8,998 | 0.02 |
| Hungarian | 8,158 | 0.01 |
| Spanish | 2,059 | 0.00 |
| Portuguese | 479 | 0.00 |
| Other foreign languages | 14,535 | 0.03 |
| Imperial citizens on 1 December 1900 | 56,367,187 | 100 |
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Danish
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Dutch
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Frisian
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Polish
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Czech (and Moravian)
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Masurian
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Kashubian
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Sorbian
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French
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Walloon
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Italian
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Lithuanian
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non-German
Read more about this topic: German Empire
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