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Languages of Europe

There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family.[1][2] Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. The three largest phyla of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each, and together account for close to 90% of Europeans.

Smaller phyla of Indo-European found in Europe include Hellenic (Greek, c. 13 million), Baltic (c. 7 million), Albanian (c. 5 million), Celtic (c. 4 million), and Armenian (c. 4 million). Indo-Aryan, though a large subfamily of Indo-European, has a relatively small number of languages in Europe, and a small number of speakers (Romani, c. 1.5 million). However, a number of Indo-Aryan languages not native to Europe are spoken in Europe today.[2]


Of the approximately 45 million Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, most speak languages within either the Uralic or Turkic families. Still smaller groups — such as Basque (language isolate), Semitic languages (Maltese, c. 0.5 million), and various languages of the Caucasus — account for less than 1% of the European population among them. Immigration has added sizeable communities of speakers of African and Asian languages, amounting to about 4% of the population,[3] with Arabic being the most widely spoken of them.


Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, English, French, Italian, and German. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe,[4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe.)

the main language of the United Kingdom and the most widespread language in the Republic of Ireland, also spoken as a second or third language by many Europeans.[7]

English

spoken in Scotland and Ulster, recognized by some as a language and by others as a dialect of English.[8] (Not to be confused with Scots-Gaelic of the Celtic language family.)

Scots

in Europe include Turkish, spoken in East Thrace and by immigrant communities; Azerbaijani is spoken in Northeast Azerbaijan and parts of Southern Russia and Gagauz is spoken in Gagauzia.

Oghuz languages

in Europe include Karaim, Crimean Tatar and Krymchak, which is spoken mainly in Crimea; Tatar, which is spoken in Tatarstan; Bashkir, which is spoken in Bashkortostan; Karachay-Balkar, which is spoken in the North Caucasus, and Kazakh, which is spoken in Northwest Kazakhstan.

Kipchak languages

were historically indigenous to much of Eastern Europe; however, most of them are extinct today, with the exception of Chuvash, which is spoken in Chuvashia.

Oghur languages

and then Koine Greek in the Mediterranean Basin from the Athenian Empire to the Eastern Roman Empire, being replaced by Modern Greek.

Classical Greek

and Modern Greek, in the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire and other parts of the Balkans south of the Jireček Line.[68]

Koine Greek

and Late Latin among the uneducated and educated populations respectively of the Roman Empire and the states that followed it in the same range no later than 900 AD; Medieval Latin and Renaissance Latin among the educated populations of western, northern, central and part of eastern Europe until the rise of the national languages in that range, beginning with the first language academy in Italy in 1582/83; Neo-Latin written only in scholarly and scientific contexts by a small minority of the educated population at scattered locations over all of Europe; ecclesiastical Latin, in spoken and written contexts of liturgy and church administration only, over the range of the Roman Catholic Church.

Vulgar Latin

or Sabir, the original of the name, an Italian-based pidgin language of mixed origins used by maritime commercial interests around the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and early Modern Age.[69]

Lingua Franca

in continental western European countries and in the Crusader states.[70]

Old French

mainly during the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (14th century) but also during other periods of Bohemian control over the Holy Roman Empire.

Czech

around the 14th–16th century, during the heyday of the Hanseatic League, mainly in Northeastern Europe across the Baltic Sea.

Middle Low German

as Castilian in Spain and New Spain from the times of the Catholic Monarchs and Columbus, c. 1492; that is, after the Reconquista, until established as a national language in the times of Louis XIV, c. 1648; subsequently multinational in all nations in or formerly in the Spanish Empire.[71]

Spanish

due to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (16th–18th centuries).

Polish

due to the Renaissance, the opera, the Italian Empire, the fashion industry and the influence of the Roman Catholic church.[72]

Italian

from the golden age under Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV c. 1648; i.e., after the Thirty Years' War, in France and the French colonial empire, until established as the national language during the French Revolution of 1789 and subsequently multinational in all nations in or formerly in the various French Empires.[70]

French

in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe.[73]

German

in Great Britain until its consolidation as a national language in the Renaissance and the rise of Modern English; subsequently internationally under the various states in or formerly in the British Empire; globally since the victories of the predominantly English speaking countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others) and their allies in the two world wars ending in 1918 (World War I) and 1945 (World War II) and the subsequent rise of the United States as a superpower and major cultural influence.

English

in the former Soviet Union and Russian Empire including Northern and Central Asia.

Russian

Ethnic groups in Europe

Eurolinguistics

European Day of Languages

Greek East and Latin West

List of endangered languages in Europe

List of multilingual countries and regions of Europe

Standard Average European

Travellingua

Everson, Michael (2001). . evertype.com. Retrieved 19 March 2010.

"The Alphabets of Europe"

Haarmann, Harald (2011). . Institute of European History. Retrieved 2 November 2011.

"Europe's Mosaic of Languages"

Reissmann, Stefan; Argador, Urion (2006). (in Esperanto, English, and German). Reissmann & Argador. Archived from the original on 22 June 2009. Retrieved 2 November 2009.

"Scpraaxoi in Europa"

Archived 9 April 2022 at the Wayback Machine

Map of Minorities & Regional and Minority Languages of Europe, Language Diversity (2017)

Zikin, Mutur (2007). (in Basque). muturzikin.com. Retrieved 2 November 2009.

"Europako Mapa linguistikoa"