After World War II
In post-1945 Germany and post-1945 Austria, the concept of Germanisation is no longer considered relevant. Danes, Frisians, and Slavic Sorbs are classified as traditional ethnic minorities and are guaranteed cultural autonomy by both the federal and state governments. Concerning the Danes, there is a treaty between Denmark and Germany from 1955 regulating the status of the German minority in Denmark and vice versa. Concerning the Frisians, the northern federal-state of Schleswig-Holstein passed a special law aimed at preserving the language. The cultural autonomy of the Sorbs is a matter of the constitutions of both Saxony and Brandenburg. Nevertheless, almost all of the Sorbs are bilingual and the Lower Sorbian language is regarded as endangered, as the number of native speakers is dwindling, even though there are programmes funded by the state to sustain the language.
In post-1945 Austria, in the federal-state of Burgenland, Hungarian and Croatian have regional protection by law. In Carinthia, Slovenian-speaking Austrians are also protected by the law.
Descendants of Polish migrant workers and miners have intermarried with the local population and are culturally German or of mixed culture. It is different with modern and present-day immigration from Poland to Germany after the fall of the iron curtain. These immigrants usually are Polish citizens and live as foreigners in Germany. For many immigrant Poles, Polish ethnicity is not the prime category through which they wish to characterise themselves or want to be evaluated by others, as it could impact their lives in a negative way.
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