Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian belong to the Uralic languages. Other languages like Turkish, Mongolian and the North Caucasian languages also have a significant number of native speakers living in Europe. The Maltese language is an exceptional case in Europe; it is the only Semitic language in Europe. Similarly, Basque is an isolated language, which means that it does not belong to any surrounding language family. Until , Latin was the language of communication in Europe.
It was then French until , when English became the common language. The 28 member states of the European Union have 24 national official languages, which are also the official languages of the EU. All law and legal documents are translated into all 24 official languages.
That means all EU documents are available in three separate alphabets. All EU citizens have the right to contact the institutions of the Union in his or her language and to receive an answer in the same language. The negotiations and meetings on the ministerial level are also translated into all official languages of the Union.
Even after Brexit , English will continue to be an official language of the EU. The documents in commission meetings and in the permanent representative committee are always available in these three languages. In the court of justice of the EU, the primary language is French. German, which became a working language only in , plays a minor role. In most of the meetings of the European council, interpretation is offered only for the five main European languages, that is, the three working languages plus Spanish and Italian.
The 60 million Italian native speakers in Europe are experts on la dolce vita. When you want to experience the authentic Italian way of life on your travels, then learning Italian is a must! You had to know this was coming, right? English, the global lingua franca, has million native speakers worldwide, with just under 60 million of those living in Europe. As for second language speakers, about a third of older Europeans can speak English, while nearly half of to year-olds have a mastery of the language.
That said, some scholars theorize that the political realities of Brexit may weaken the dominance of English in Europe in the future. All the more reason to add another language under your belt now. That, along with the fact that 43 million Europeans claim Spanish as their mother tongue, is reason enough to start learning this language. By the way, did you know that Spanish is one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn?
While perhaps not as well-known as the other languages on this list, there are 36 million Polish native speakers who live in Europe. Most of these individuals naturally live in Poland, but Polish is also widely spoken in Czechia, Hungary, Belarus and Ukraine. Collectively, almost 6 percent of the European population speaks Polish as a first, second or third language. The national language of Ukraine is spoken by 27 million native speakers, with the majority residing in Europe.
The last spot on our list goes to Dutch, narrowly beating out Romanian for a spot in the Top Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands but also enjoys co-official status in Belgium. In total, 22 million Europeans speak Dutch as their mother tongue. While this may seem like a small number, this language is pretty easy to pick up for native English speakers, especially compared to the other Germanic languages!
Why not add it to your repertoire for your next trip to Amsterdam? This article was originally published in It has been updated with more recent data and information. How did they become so good at so many languages? And these numbers are only climbing over the years.
It means Europeans have been socialized to be bilinguals and trilinguals. Sure, there are language schools all over the place, but the best way to learn a language, as the survey found with Europeans, is in the routines of everyday life. Europe, as a result of geography and of the history of migrations, has evolved into a multi-cultural and multi-language society.
Not everyone can grow up in that kind of immersive environment, though, where borrowing sugar from your next-door neighbor also functions as a language lesson. So learners from other parts of the world make do with the next best thing: online immersion. As mentioned above, there are all kinds of ways to immerse yourself in your target language, and there are plenty of options when it comes to European languages, including TV , movies , radio and video.
FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
If you map out the areas where the Romance languages are spoken today, they correlate pretty well to the territories held by the Western Roman Empire in its prime. They diverged and started to follow independent linguistic evolutions with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. These territories splintered into many different independent states. The Latin in these areas became slowly differentiated.
For example, they borrowed from the peoples that came to settle in the different territories after the fall. They all came from the Latin planeta.
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