Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 .)
L1+L2: c. 100 million in European Russia, 39 million in Ukraine, 7 million in Belarus, 7 million in Poland, 2 million in Latvia, c. 2 million in the European portion of Kazakhstan, 1.8 million in Moldova, 1.1 million in Estonia. Russian at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required).
Those who live in southern European countries or countries where one of the major European languages is a state language have a lower likelihood of speaking multiple foreign languages. Only 5% of Turks, 13% of Irish, 16% of Italians, 17% of Spaniards and 18% of Britons speak at least two languages apart from their native language.
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 ...
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 ...
English is the most commonly spoken foreign language in 19 out of 25 European Union countries (excluding Ireland) [11] In the EU25, working knowledge of English as a foreign language is clearly leading at 38%, followed by German and French (at 14% each), Russian and Spanish (at 6% each), and Italian (3%). [12] ".
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain. [ 4][ 5][ 6] The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain.
Formally speaking, the national language of Spain, the official Spanish language, is the Castilian language (as opposed to the regional languages of Spain, such as Galician, Catalan, Asturleonese, and Basque ). As such both names, español and castellano, have distinct and independent meanings that may be required for clarity in some specific ...