In December 2019, the city-state of Berlin had a population of 3,769,495 registered inhabitants[1] in an area of 891.82 square kilometers (344.33 sq mi).

Nevertheless, Berlin's population remained ethnically and even regionally very homogeneous: In 1895, over 98% of inhabitants spoke German as their native language.

The industrialisation had brought about a rapid expansion of the suburbs, many of them developed explicitly for workers of specific factories, e.g. Siemensstadt and Borsigwalde.

This expansion made Berlin the most populous city proper of Continental Europe in the interwar period (though not the largest agglomeration[6]) and the third-largest in the world behind London and New York.

The four-million mark was surpassed in the 1920s, and in 1942, the officially registered population reached its maximum of 4.48 million, although because of the war conditions, this was an overestimation.

Berlin is home to about 250,000 Turks (especially in Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Wedding, a locality in the borough of Mitte),[10] the largest Turkish community outside Turkey.

Ethnic Germans from countries from the former Soviet Union make up the largest portion of the Russian-speaking community.

[12] Immigration continues from a number of Western countries, particularly by young people from Germany and other parts of Europe.

[13] Berlin is among the cities in Germany that have received the biggest amount of refugees after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

[15] On 31 December 2015, the city-state of Berlin had a population of 3,520,031 registered inhabitants[3] in an area of 891.85 km2 (344.35 sq mi).

[18] The entire Berlin-Brandenburg capital region has a population of more than 6 million in an area of 30,370 km2 (11,726 sq mi).

[20] As of December 2013 there were approximately 1,000,000 people (about 30 percent of the population) with an immigrant background living in Berlin, with significant differences in their distribution.

The immigrant community is diverse, with Middle Easterners (including Turkish and Kurdish people and Arabs), smaller numbers of East Asians, Sub-Saharan Africans and other European immigrants, Eastern Europeans forming the largest groups.

[23] There are more than 25 non-indigenous communities with a population of at least 10,000 people, including Turkish, Kurdish, Polish, Russian, Croatian, Palestinian, Serbian, Italian, Bosnian, Vietnamese, American, Romanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Austrian, Ghanaian, Ukrainian, French, British, Spanish, Israeli, Thai, Iranian, Egyptian and Syrian communities.

The regiolect is now seen more as a sociolect, largely through increased immigration and trends among the educated population to speak standard German in everyday life.

EKBO is a member of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) and Union Evangelischer Kirchen (UEK), and accounts for 18.7% of the local population.