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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 Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family— English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several ...
Esperanto ( / ˌɛspəˈrɑːntoʊ /, /- æntoʊ /) [7] [8] is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it is intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language" ( la Lingvo Internacia ). Zamenhof first described the ...
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic ...
Spanish ( español) or Castilian ( castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with about 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 600 million when including second language ...
In Basque, the name of the language is officially euskara (alongside various dialect forms). In French, the language is normally called basque, though euskara has become common in recent times. Spanish has a greater variety of names for the language. Today, it is most commonly referred to as vasco, lengua vasca, or euskera.
A multilingual person is someone who can communicate in more than one language actively (through speaking, writing, or signing). Multilingual people can logically speak any language they write in (aside from mute multilingual people [ 36] ), but they cannot necessarily write in any language they speak. [ 37]
Yiddish ( ייִדיש, יידיש or אידיש, yidish or idish, pronounced [ˈ (j)ɪdɪʃ], lit. 'Jewish'; ייִדיש-טײַטש, historically also Yidish-Taytsh, lit. 'Judeo-German') [10] is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originates from the 9th century [11] : 2 Central Europe, providing the ...