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How many native speakers of German are there?

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Thematic map of Europe displaying the distribution of Germanic languages, with different colors indicating regions where English, German, Netherlandic (Dutch), Frisian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese are spoken. Striped areas mark regions where bilingualism is common, and language regions cover countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and parts of surrounding countries. — Germanic languages Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.

There are approximately 75,282,080 native speakers of German worldwide, according to data from the early 2020s. Other estimates suggest that Standard German is the native language of about 80 million people.12

While German is a West Germanic language with over 130 million total speakers globally, these figures distinguish between native speakers and those who have acquired the language as a second or foreign language.2