The European Day of Languages (EDL) is praised on September 26 every year established by the Council of Europe since 2001. Here are some interesting and fun facts about European languages.
30 Interesting Facts about European languages
- There are over 225 indigenous languages in Europe, speaking to around 3 percent of the world’s total.
- There are more than 200 indigenous languages in Europe – that seems like a lot however it’s in reality just around three percent of the world’s total of 6000-7000.
- There are somewhere in the range of 6000 and 7000 languages in the world – spoken by 7 billion individuals partitioned into 189 independent states.
- Languages are identified with one another like the individuals from a family. Most European languages have a place with the enormous Indo-European family of languages that prevailed in what is presently the Middle East.
- Indo-European, which incorporates Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Slavic, and the Romance languages (e.g., Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian). Non-Indo-European, which incorporates the Uralic languages (e.g., Finnic and Finno-Ugric) and Basque.
- There are 24 official languages in the European Union. In alphabetical order, they are…
- Bulgarian
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hungarian
- Irish
- Italian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Maltese
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Languages are some of the time identified with one another on the off chance that they originate from comparative roots. These are known as language families. The three fundamental language families in Europe are Germanic, Romance, and Slavic.
- As per an EU survey, 54 percent of EU residents speak another language, 25 percent speak two foreign languages (high five!).
- In a 2012 European Commission survey, the five most broadly spoken languages in the EU were demonstrated to be English (38%), French (12%), German (11%), Spanish (7%), and Russian (5%). That last one, Russian, isn’t an official language, yet is spoken by a sizable number of individuals.
- In their every day lives, Europeans progressively come across foreign languages. There is a need to produce a greater enthusiasm for languages among European residents.
- German is the most generally spoken mother language (18 percent), followed by English and Italian (both 13 percent), and French (12 percent).
- European cities are the ideal spot to observe this multilingual diversity in its natural habitat: In London, for instance, more than 300 languages are spoken (Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, Berber, Hindi, Punjabi, and so forth.).
- The record holder of most languages spoken on its domain is Russia: Depending on the criteria used, 130 – 200 different languages are spoken there.
- The most spoken language in Europe is Russian, if you just tally local speakers, or English, on the off chance that you incorporate speakers of English as a second language.
- English is the leader among EU nations; it’s viewed as the most valuable language, followed by French and German.
- European languages love to obtain words from one another. For instance, we use French words in English constantly, and there are a lot of English words that we’ve obtained from German, as well.
- Most European languages use the Latin alphabet and some Slavic languages use the Cyrillic alphabet. Armenian, Georgian, Greek, and Yiddish have their alphabet.
- The Slavic languages incorporate Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Macedonian, and others.
- The Romance languages incorporate Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, among others.
- German is the only language in the world to capitalize nouns.
- The Germanic family of languages incorporates Danish, Dutch, English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Yiddish, among others.
- In French, there are 13 distinct approaches to pronounce the letter „o”.
- French and English are the only languages educated at schools all through the world.
- Russia is thought to be home to speakers of more than 100 languages. Close by Russian, Chechen, Tatar and Bashkir are broadly spoken.
- Basque is thought to be the oldest language spoken in Europe. It is spoken in the Basque nation that rides the French-Spanish border on the Atlantic coast.
- Basque, which is spoken in regions of France and Spain, is the only European language that isn’t identified with some other language; its origin is as yet unknown.
- Catalan, spoken by 6,000,000 individuals, is one of the biggest ‘stateless’ languages. It is spoken in Catalonia on the east coast of Spain.
- Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi are the most widely spoken non-European languages in Europe. These three languages likewise have their alphabet and writing system.
- The modern standardized Italian language was to a great extent fixed during the process of Italian unification during the 19th century.
- Italian additionally happens to be one of the official languages of Switzerland; much Swiss Italian vocabulary comes from French.
