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Most of the many languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Another major family is the Finno-Ugric. The Turkic family also has several European members. The North and South Caucasian families are important in the southeastern extremity of geographical Europe. Basque is a language isolate.
As yet this list does not include languages spoken by relatively recently-arrived migrant communities.
The Basque language of the northern Iberian Peninsula is a language isolate, and as such is not related to any other language. This language may date back 5,000 years, before waves of Indo-European speaking peoples settled in Europe, but haven't penetrated the area of northern Spain and southwest France until the first millennia AD. The language is also spoken by immigrants in Australia, Costa Rica, Mexico, the Philippines, and the USA [1].
The Finno-Ugric languages are a subfamily of the Uralic language family.
A Semitic language spoken in Malta and related to Arabic but written with the Latin script. It is the smallest official language of the EU in terms of speakers.
Most European languages are Indo-European languages. This large language-family is descended from a common language that was spoken thousands of years ago, which is referred to as Proto-Indo-European.
The language, also known as Shqip is made up of two major dialects, Geg and Tosk spoken in the country of Albania, by Albanian speaking minorities in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, in Kosovo, Serbia, and some Albanian speakers living in parts of Montenegro.
The Armenian language is widely spoken as the majority language in Armenia which was under the Soviet Union until 1991. There are Armenian speakers in globally scattered communities of the Armenian diaspora in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas (in North and South America).
(descending from Old Norse)
The Romance languages descended from the Vulgar Latin spoken across most of the lands of the Roman Empire.
Europe’s history is characterized by three linguas francas:
The first type of dictionaries are glossaries, i.e. more or less structured lists of lexical pairs (in alphabetical order or according to conceptual fields). The Latin-German (Latin-Bavarian) Abrogans is among the first. A new wave of lexicography can be seen from the late 15th century onwards (after the introduction of the printing press, with the growing interest for standardizing languages).
In the Middle Ages the two most important definitory elements of Europe were Christianitas and Latinitas. Thus language—at least the supranational language—played an elementary role. This changed with the spread of the national languages in official contexts and the rise of a national feeling. Among other things, this led to projects of standardizing national language and gave birth to a number of language academies (e.g. 1582 Accademia della Crusca in Florence, 1617 Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, 1635 Académie française, 1713 Real Academia de la Lengua in Madrid). “Language” was then (and still ist today) more connected with “nation” than with “civilization” (particularly in France). “Language” was also used to create a feeling of “religious/ethnic identity” (e.g. different Bible translations by Catholics and Protestants of the same language).
Among the first standardization discussions and processes are the ones for Italian (“questione della lingua”: Modern Tuscan/Florentine vs. Old Tuscan/Florentine vs. Venetian > Modern Florentine + archaic Tuscan + Upper Italian), French (standard is based on Parisian), English (standard is based on the London dialect) and (High) German (based on: chancellery of Meißen/Saxony + Middle German + chancellery of Prague/Bohemia [“Common German”]). But also a number of other nations have begun to look for and develop a standard variety in the 16th century.
Despite the tremendous importance of English, Europe is always associated with its linguistic diversity, which also includes the special protection of minority languages, e.g. by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This underlines that the popular view of “one nation = one language” is mostly false, despite attempts at national linguistic homogenization in France during the Revolution or in Franco's Spain or in contemporary Greece.[3] A minority language can be defined as a language used by a group that defines itself as an ethnic minority group, whereby the language of this group is typologically different and not a dialect of the standard language. In Europe some languages are in quite a strong position, in the sense that they are given special status, (e.g. Basque, Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Rhaeto-Romance/Romansh), whereas others are in a rather weak position (e.g. Frisian, Scottish Gaelic, Turkish)—especially allochthonous minority languages are not given official status in the EU (in part because they are not part of the cultural heritage of a civilization). Some minor languages don’t even have a standard yet, i.e. they have not even reached the level of an ausbausprache yet, which could be changed, e.g., if these languages were given official status. (cf. also next section).
France is the origin of two laws, or decrees, concerning language: the Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts (1539), which says that every document in France should be written in French (i.e. not in Latin nor Occitan) and the Loi Toubon (1994), which aims to eliminate Anglicisms from official documents. But Europe’s essentially characteristic feature is linguistic diversity and tolerance. An illustrative proof of the promotion of linguistic diversity is the translation school in Toledo, founded in the 12th century (in medieval Toledo the Christian, the Jewish and the Arab civilizations lived together remarkably peacefully).
This tolerant linguistic attitude is also the reason why the EU’s general rule is that every official national language is also an official EU language. However, Flemish (Southern Dutch, one official language of Belgium) and Letzebuergish/Luxemburgish are not official EU languages, because there are also other (stronger) official languages with “EU status” in the respective nations. Several concepts for a EU language policy are being debated:
New immigrants in European countries are expected to learn the host nation's language, but are still speaking and reading their native languages (i.e. Arabic, Hindustani/Urdu, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili and Tahitian) in Europe's increasingly multiethnic/multicultural profile. But, those languages aren't native or indigenous to Europe, therefore aren't considered important in the issue of allowing them printed in European countries' official documents.
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