Germans

n. native of Germany, resident of Germany

In a context of antiquity (pre AD 500), "Germans" is used in the sense of Germanic tribes. Germans are defined as an ethnic group, in the sense of sharing a common German culture, citizenship, speaking the German language as a mother tongue and being born in Germany. Germans are also defined by their national citizenship, which had, in the course of German history, varying relations to the above (German culture), according to the influence of subcultures and society in general (also refer to Imperial Germans, Federal Germans etc. and Demographics of Germany). Out of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, about 75 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 70 million people of German ancestry (mainly in the USA, Brazil, Argentina, Kazakhstan and Canada) who are not native speakers of German but who may still consider themselves ethnic Germans, so that the total number of Germans worldwide lies between 75 and 160 million, depending to the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans or partial German ancestry). In the USA, 15.2% of citizens identify as of German American according to the United States Census of 2000, more than any other group.
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(pl. )
of German
  

<human language> \j*r'mn\ A human language written (in latin alphabet) and spoken in Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland.
German writing normally uses four non-ASCII characters: "", the first three have "umlauts" (two dots over the top): A O and U and the last is a double-S ("scharfes S") which looks like the Greek letter beta (except in capitalised words where it should be written "SS"). These can be written in ASCII in several ways, the most common are ae, oe ue AE OE UE ss or sz and the TeX versions "a "o "u "A "O "U "s.
See also ABEND, blinkenlights, DAU, DIN, gedanken, GMD, kluge.
Usenet newsgroup: news:soc.culture.german. ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/usenet/news-info/soc.answers/german-faq, ftp://alice.fmi.uni-passau.de/pub/dictionaries/german.dat.Z.
(1995-03-31)

Noun
1. a person of German nationality
(hypernym) European
(hyponym) Teuton
(member-holonym) Germany, Federal Republic of Germany, Deutschland, FRG
2. the standard German language; developed historically from West Germanic
(synonym) High German, German language
(hypernym) West Germanic, West Germanic language
(hyponym) Old High German
(classification) Germany, Federal Republic of Germany, Deutschland, FRG
Adjective
1. of or pertaining to or characteristic of Germany or its people or language; "German philosophers"; "German universities"; "German literature"
(pertainym) Germany, Federal Republic of Germany, Deutschland, FRG
2. of a more or less German nature; somewhat German; "Germanic peoples"; "his Germanic nature"; "formidable volumes Teutonic in their thoroughness"
(synonym) Germanic, Teutonic
(pertainym) Germany, Federal Republic of Germany, Deutschland, FRG