Germans (German: Deutsche) are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe,^{[30][31][32][33]} who share a common German ancestry, culture, and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans. The English term Germans has been the name for the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages.^{[note 3]} Ever since the onset of the Protestant Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century, German society has been characterized by a Catholic-Protestant divide.^[34]

Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world,^[35] roughly 80 million consider themselves Germans.^{[citation needed]} There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil (mainly in the South Region of the country), Argentina, Canada, South Africa, the post-Soviet states (mainly in Russia and Kazakhstan), and France, each accounting for at least 1 million.^{[note 4]} Thus, the total number of Germans lies somewhere between 100 and more than 150 million, depending on the criteria applied^[1] (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).