Post 1500, what countries can have German as the main language outside of Europe?

Well no country had a single group really become the majority, Argentina just maybe so I guess you could have a situation like that that ends with 2 official languages.
Having a group of people conquer a territory and displace much of the previous population is quite a bit different than what was proposed above (having lots of German-speaking Jews settle in Palestine).



Those are - on a national scale - minority communities. Their national governments have not changed their languages due to immigration. In fact, in all of these cases those minority languages declined as their communities faced pressure to conform to the national language.
Those minorities were often quite small. German is coofficial in some places in Brazil so if get like a big minority(40%+) you could get a cooficial status for it. Germany is also bigger and economically more influential so you could have like big German migrant community plus German economic ties and influence with a Central American country.
 
I think the Netherlands is still your best bet. If you butterfly the Dutch Revolt through a different Habsburg succession (a second son surviving adulthood to Charles V is the main divergence in the timeline I'm currently toying with) you'd have the Netherlands as an economic superpower that still pulls the demographic weight of the Holy Roman Empire. In fact, drawing heavily on the Germanic population might shift the language in the Dutch colonies closer to OTL contemporary German than Dutch, satisfying the conditions of OP. With a POD after the Dutch Revolt though, it becomes substantially harder. The fight against Spain is really what defined the Netherlands as fully independent from the Holy Roman Empire and by extension, the German nation.

So: a Nieuw-Nederlands in North America in place of some of OTL's 13 colonies or Canada; perhaps, just perhaps, a Dutch Brazil or at least Guinea/Surinam; the Kaapland/Zuidafrika; Zeylan (Dutch Sri Lanka) and Formoza (Taiwan), based on the assumption that a Habsburg Netherlands would be a stronger merchant and naval power both because it's economy and military isn't devastated by the Eighty Years War (though it will definitely be more heavily drawn into whatever conflict arises over the Protestant Reformation and the independence of the princes), and (perhaps) because of the unifying force of a central monarch much earlier.

Of course in this case the Netherlands might gobble up enough land westward to be the Prussia of TTL and provide a catalyst for unification, in which case the descendant of early Modern Dutch would be what we call German.
 
Top