Cultures of Germany's recognised national minorities

The Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, both ratified by Germany, are the basis for the protection and promotion of the cultures of national minorities living in Germany: these include the Sorbian people in Saxony and Brandenburg, the Danish minority and the Frisian ethnic group in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony as well as the German Sinti and Roma living in several Länder. These national minorities make a self-confident contribution to the cultural wealth of Germany, in accordance with the Council of Europe Framework Convention. The Länder and the Federal Government help these minorities maintain their languages along with their culture and traditions. For the Federal Government and the Länder, this promotion is a manifestation of the conviction that the national minorities contribute significantly to the diversity of cultural expressions and to Germany’s cultural wealth. In addition to the minorities themselves, their languages as well as the regional language of Low German are protected. These languages are spoken in a total of eight Länder (Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Pomeranian, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt, and Schleswig-Holstein).