Largest possible number of German-speaking countries today

How many German-speaking countries can we have in the 21st century without Germany's own borders in the periods 1945-1990 and 1990-present being any different from OTL?
At the moment we have four majority German-speaking countries:
  • Germany
  • Austria
  • Switzerland
  • Liechtenstein
Along with two other countries where German an official language at national level but not a majority language:
  • Belgium
  • Luxembourg
Here are the rules:
  • The general outcome of both world wars must be the same
  • The post-war and post-reunification borders of Germany itself can't be any different from OTL.
 
There's a Federal Republic of Austria and an Austrian Democratic Republic--and for some reason, unlike their German counterparts, they don't reunify after the Cold War ends. .
 
"During the 1970s, Soviet authorities began to confront growing dissident demands through a combination of repression and accommodation, what scholar Hanya Shiro describes as the “carrot and stick” approach to general protest activities and especially the nationalities problem. KGB chief Yuri Andropov in particular followed this policy course in the waning days of the Leonid Brezhnev regime. Besides cracking down on dissidents, Andropov oversaw plans for a German autonomous oblast near Tselinograd (now Astana), Kazakhstan, from 1976 to 1980. The regime considered it necessary to respond to the ethnic group’s emerging national protest movement, West Germany’s mounting diplomatic pressures, and the wider international community’s growing demands to protect emigration, human and minority rights. The USSR remained committed to the long-term integration and acculturation of its almost two million Germans, some of its most prized Soviet citizen-workers, with nearly half living in the Kazakh SSR. It sought to address domestic and foreign criticisms about the “German question” by formulating this new, but rather modest, nationality solution. The plan collapsed after June 1979, however, amid public demonstrations in the Kazakh SSR. Kazakh opposition at all levels revealed the complicated and troubling nature of Soviet nationality affairs and the limits of central authority over the periphery. The aborted plan’s legacy was the ethnic Germans’ continued lack of a national-territorial “container” when the USSR disintegrated in 1991. The proposal represented the regime’s first serious consideration of German autonomy since the group lost its remaining national districts and the Volga German ASSR between 1938 and 1941. Though it remains conjectural, the oblast could have established an embryonic national centre for Germans, from which they would have found themselves in a better political bargaining position during the dramatic Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras. It also could have helped reduce the dramatic mass migration of Germans from the former USSR to united Germany after 1990." http://eurasiahistory.files.wordpre...a-studies-soc-journal-vol-3-no1-jan-20141.pdf

So what we need is an ATL where the German oblast is indeed created--and where, after the downfall of the USSR. it declares independence from Kazakhstan, and gets the backing of Russia...
 
Maybe have a "Prussian Soviet Socialist Republic" in former East Prussia, in addition to the Volga German ASSR, which gains independence after the fall of the USSR. In general, you'd need to change the nature of explusion of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe. Somehow keeping the Banat Republic around is interesting, since it was akin to Switzerland in being very multiethnic but unfortunately lacking the long tradition of Swiss unity. Maybe you could keep Bukovina around too as a buffer state between Romania and Ukraine/USSR, even though Germans would be a minority (and a significant number of people counted as Germans there were Jews who lated were murdered in the Holocaust). Maybe if both states were around, discounting butterflies, they could end up serving as home nations for Eastern European Germans expelled from their native lands, either through local branches of the NSDAP and a sort of Heim ins Reich program or the USSR and other states deciding to use those states as dumping grounds for Eastern European Germans, combined with those states offering to take the Eastern European Germans in.

Aside from Eastern Europe, maybe Alsace-Lorraine gets independent? But I don't see how the hell you could do that post-1945.

Well one possibility would be Namibia/German southwest Africa if enough Germans settled there. same with rest of German colonial empire. You could also have a German speaking Venezuela if Klein-Venedig had succeeded in establishing permanent settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein-Venedig

Klein-Venedig is so early (and totally reliant on how the Habsburgs run their empire) that you could have almost anything. And even earlier than that, if Henry the Lion's domain survives, or otherwise you get a strong North Sea-focused German state, it doesn't seem too implausible to have many more German colonies in the Americas assuming you have a "Germany" (really Saxony) focused on New World colonialism and trade.
 

Czar Kaizer

Banned
If Germany can hold onto it's colonies until the 60's then you could have a German speaking Cameroon, Tanganyika and Togo.
 

Redbeard

Banned
In 18th century and earlier Denmark to a very large degree was German speaking (at least if Platdeutsch is considered German, it is not quite the same as Hochdeutsch), especially in towns and cities and not just in Slesvig-Holsten. The "danishifisation"started in the 1780s and after the S-H wars German became quite untrendy in the Kingdom parts (OTL Denmark excl. Sønderjylland/N.Slesvig) and after 1920 also in Sønderjylland/N.Slesvig. It would not be implausible to find a PoD before 1780 where Denmark has been further Germanised and by 21st century is German (Platdeutsch) speaking with Danish being something studied by nerds and talked by even fewer.

The most tricky part would be having exactly same border as in OTL, as that is pretty much dictated by language, but I suppose you could find some dynastic reason with some pre 1780 PoD for a division of S-H at exactly the OTL border. Not easy though.

If Denmark wins the S-H wars and has (more of) S-H included a much larger part of the population will have German as their first language - and that would probably mean German being an official language along Danish - but the border will be different from OTL.
 
This is tricky. I can't see a real way, as Germany today is basically what the heartland was. There were Germans all over Europe, but they never came in swarms that replaced everyone and they were often there at the patronage of some emperor or another, be they Austrian or Russian. I don't suppose we can think about having more subdivisions having German of some variety as a regional language? Then we could perhaps get one in Italy, one in Romania.... Really hard to think of how to do this, as without an earlier POD to prevent Eastern and Southern Europeans from deporting all remaining Germans who hadn't fled from partisans, the Red Army, or mobs of Eastern and Southern Europeans. WWII led to a looooot of national consolidation.
 
Some parts of Croatia had significant numbers of Volks-Deutsch. Plus many Croatians were Roman Catholic and aligned with the Holy Roman Empire. That might give Austria an excuse to include the Croatian Dalmatian coast as part of a greater Germany.

A greater stretch is all the lands conquered by Germanic tribes in Italy and Iberia after the Roman Empire fell (4th century after Christ). Claiming them as Volks-Deutsch is a stretch because most of those Germanic elite took local wives. Their children and grand-children learned local languages and quickly assimilated.
 

Driftless

Donor
Could there have been more of a lasting "language of business" reach of German through the Hanseatic League? Think of the many current country's whose primary language is local, but the common language for business, or even government in some cases... is English or French
 

Redbeard

Banned
Could there have been more of a lasting "language of business" reach of German through the Hanseatic League? Think of the many current country's whose primary language is local, but the common language for business, or even government in some cases... is English or French
Indeed yes. It was not at least through the Hansa that so many German speakers lived in cities and towns all over Scandinavia. In a PoD where the Hansa doesn't bleed white fighting the Kings we could have seen a consolidation of the German speaking urban populations and then gradually have this spread to the rural areas. What is in the cities in one century usually will have spread to the country side in the next century/decade/year/minute...
 
If German remains the dominant trading language throughout the Hanseatic League, then it would include all of Scandanavian, Iceland, Greenland, Volga and Dnieper Rivers, Danube River, etc.
German could also dominate trade throughout the Dutch Empire ........ hmmmmm??????
WI Prince William of Orange encouraged British traders to conduct their business in Low-German dialects?????
 
I seem to remember from a high school class that some time early in history of the United States that there was a congressional vote on an officially language and German only missed becoming the official language by a single vote
 
I seem to remember from a high school class that some time early in history of the United States that there was a congressional vote on an officially language and German only missed becoming the official language by a single vote

That is an urban legend (and one repeated surprisingly often on AH.com)
 
I seem to remember from a high school class that some time early in history of the United States that there was a congressional vote on an officially language and German only missed becoming the official language by a single vote

Ah, that again (sorry for any links that may no longer work in this 2002 post of mine):

***

The answer is that it is not true. There is no way German could have been
adopted as the official language of the US.

See the FAQ at http://groups.google.com/groups?th=ce6e31b5d198f8f1
11.e. Did the US come within one vote of adopting German as its
official language?
No. This urban legend seems to be based on a 1795 petition to print
some laws in German as well as (not instead of) English. During the
debate, a motion to adjourn and consider the matter later failed by
one vote. No vote was taken on the actual proposal. Later that year,
Congress voted to issue federal laws in English only; the vote tally
does not seem to have been recorded.

Or to quote an old post of mine:

The idea that the US almost adopted German as its official language is a
myth. According to http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/kade/adams/chap1.html

"Americans of German origin were about 9% of the total population of the
youthful United States around the close of the 18th century." Hardly
sufficient to make it plausible for German to be adopted as a national
language. Even in Pennsylvania, Germans were only about a third of the
population, which is why the same source notes "We know too that the
percentage of German-speakers was never large enough that German might
have become the official or second language of any state in the Union.
Nevertheless, the stubborn legend that on one occasion just a single vote
caused German to lose the battle in becoming the official language of the
United States simply will not fade." For more on that legend, see
http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/kade/adams/chap7.html which points out:

"When German-language farmers in Augusta County, Virginia petitioned the
U.S. House of Representatives in 1794 for a German translation of the
booklet containing the laws and other government regulations -- copies of
which had been distributed free in the English language -- officials
simply ignored them. Even the bilingual Speaker of the House of
Representatives, Frederick Augustus Conrad Mühlenberg, refused to support
their modest request, arguing that the faster the Germans became
Americans, the better. No doubt, disappointment with his negative, though
realistic, posture contributed a generation later to the birth of this
legend."

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/CqyFtveETV8/DMVivKpyRCYJ
 

SpookyBoy

Banned
Perhaps Germany can unite earlier which allows it more of a headstart in becoming an overseas colonial power?

EDIT: nvm I didn't read the requirements properly
 
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