What do you call a group of European languages?

What do you call a group of European languages?

Indo-European languages, family of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia.

What are the 4 European languages?

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

What are the 3 main language categories spoken in Europe?

All 24 official languages of the EU are accepted as working languages, but in practice only three – English, French, and German – are in wide general use, and of these, English is the most commonly used.

How many dialects are in Europe?

The EU has 24 official languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

What does lingua franca?

A lingua franca is a common language serving as a regular means of communication relating to scientific, technological, and academic information between different linguistic groups in a multilingual speech community.

Why is it called Indo-European?

Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India. A synonym is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), specifying the family’s southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches.

Why would people in Switzerland speak Italian French and German?

To keep the peace, each canton has the ability to decide its own official languages. The particular languages spoken by each canton represents both the geographical and cultural boundaries of Switzerland and the influence of the closest countries to them.

What are regional dialects?

Regional dialect: A regional dialect is not a distinct language but a variety of a language spoken in a particular area of a country. Some regional dialects have been given traditional names which mark them out as being significantly different from standard varieties spoken in the same place.

What is pidgin and creole?

A pidgin is nobody’s natural language; a creole develops as a new generation grows up speaking the pidgin as its main language. The grammar of a creole usually remains simpler than that of the parent languages, but the new language begins to develop larger vocabularies to provide for a wider range of situations.

What is a language subfamily?

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family.

What are the six Indo-European languages?

There are six Indo-European languages spoken by millions of people in Europe today, including: Hellenic (Greek); Romance (Latin-based languages of the Mediterranean and Romanian); Celtic (largely extinct, but Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton); Germanic (Scandinavian languages, modern German, Dutch, and English); Balto- …

Is Poland Balkan or Slavic?

Countries with substantial Slavic populations, but which aren’t majority Slavic countries include Germany and Denmark….Slavic Countries 2022.