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The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 .)
Dutch ( endonym: Nederlands [ˈneːdərlɑnts] ⓘ) is a West Germanic language, spoken by about 25 million people as a first language [4] and 5 million as a second language and is the third most spoken Germanic language. In Europe, Dutch is the native language of most of the population of the Netherlands and Flanders (or 60% of the population ...
In its modern form, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora .
Italian is a major language in Europe, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is the third-most-widely spoken native language in the European Union (13% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 ...