Heimat (German: [ˈhaɪmaːt] ^ⓘ) is a German word translating to 'home' or 'homeland'. The word has connotations specific to German culture, German society and specifically German Romanticism, German nationalism, German statehood and regionalism so that it has no exact English equivalent. The word describes a state of belonging "the opposite of feeling alien," and its definition is not limited to a geographical place.

There is no single definition for the term "heimat". Bausinger describes it as a spatial and social unit of medium range, wherein the individual is able to experience safety and the reliability of its existence, as well as a place of a deeper trust:

Heimat als Nahwelt, die verständlich und durchschaubar ist, als Rahmen, in dem sich Verhaltenserwartungen stabilisieren, in dem sinnvolles, abschätzbares Handeln möglich ist – Heimat also als Gegensatz zu Fremdheit und Entfremdung, als Bereich der Aneignung, der aktiven Durchdringung, der Verlässlichkeit.

Home is the close environment that is understandable and transparent, as a frame, in which behavioral expectations are met, in which reasonable, expectable action is possible – in contrast to foreignness and alienation, as a sector of aversion, of active saturation, of reliability.

Greverus (1979) focuses especially on the concept of identity. To her, "heimat" is an "idyllic world" and can only be found within the trinity of community, space and tradition; because only there human desires for identity, safety and an active designing of life can be pleased. In any case "heimat", or even better: the examination thereof, is one of several identification sectors creating self-awareness.

In terms of ethnology and anthropology, "heimat" reflects the need for spatial orientation and the first "territory" that can offer identity, stimulation and safety for one's own existence (Paul Leyhausen). From an existentially philosophical perspective, home provides the individual with a spatiotemporal orientation for self-preparation, in opposition to the term of strangeness (Otto Friedrich Bollnow). In terms of sociology, home belongs to the constitutional conditions for group identity in complementarity to strangeness (Georg Simmel).

The German equivalent of "home" is Heim (Germanic *haim). The feminine noun Heimat is attested around the 11th century (late OHG heimōti n., MGH heimōt(e) f., n.) by way of the suffix *-ōt(i)- expressing a state or condition also found in Monat = month, which became somewhat productive in medieval German (cf. Heirat, Zierat, Kleinod, Einöde). There is a close Gothic cognate haimōþli (for ἀγρός "lands, homestead" in Mark 10, reflected in OHG heimōdili).

The semantic distinction from simple "home" (Heim) at least by the 16th century is that Heim denotes an individual house (or homestead, farmstead inhabited by an extended family) while Heimat denotes the wider homeland (patria) of a people or tribe. It is glossed with patria throughout, and as such is synonymous with Vaterland. Luther translates the phrase "the land of my kindred" (terra nativitatis mea) in Genesis 24:7 as meine Heimat. Use of Heimat in the larger sense of Germany as the homeland of a German nation is first recorded in the 17th century Zincgref, Apophthegmata 1626–1631). The word nevertheless retains the pragmatic sense of habitat (of plants and animals, Philipp Andreas Nemnich), a person's place of birth or permanent residence, and in Upper German (Bavarian and Swiss) also of the house inherited from one's father.