Austrians (German: Österreicher) are a nation and an ethnic group originating from the Republic of Austria and its historical predecessor states who share a common Austrian culture and Austrian descent. Due to their common history and belonging to the Holy Roman Empire until 1806, German-speaking Austrians were historically regarded as Germans, but after the founding of a German national state, the German Empire in 1871, and after the events of W...
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Austrians (German: Österreicher) are a nation and an ethnic group originating from the Republic of Austria and its historical predecessor states who share a common Austrian culture and Austrian descent. Due to their common history and belonging to the Holy Roman Empire until 1806, German-speaking Austrians were historically regarded as Germans, but after the founding of a German national state, the German Empire in 1871, and after the events of World War II and Nazism, this has fallen out of fashion and is often considered offensive.
Austrians have also been defined by their national citizenship, which had, in the course of Austrian history, varying relations to the above, for example referring to a native German-speaker of the one-time Habsburg empire, or in a wider sense to any citizen of any of the various lands of that empire that did not form the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary. In the latter sense, the definition included many ethnic minorities and speakers of up to twelve...
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