Population
Two of the most populous states of Germany, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, are part of Southern Germany; they have a combined population of 23,5 million people. In the broader sense (with Rhineland-Palatinate and the Saarland), Southern Germany includes roughly 30 million people. Thus, about 40% of the German population and almost 30% of all native speakers of the German language live there.
The region has a Catholic majority, but also a significant Lutheran Protestant population (especially in Northern Württemberg and some parts of Baden and Franconia (Northern Bavaria)), in contrast to the almost entirely Protestant Northern Germany. Due to the immigration of non-Christians, mainly Turks (see Turks in Germany) during the last decades of the 20th century, there is also a small number (roughly 250.000, i.e. 2-3% of the population) of Muslims.
Read more about this topic: Southern Germany
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)