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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 nascent Ashkenazi ...
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 ...
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 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.
Paganism (from classical Latin pāgānus "rural", "rustic", later "civilian") is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for people in the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, [1] or ethnic religions other than Judaism. In the time of the Roman Empire, individuals fell into the pagan class either because they were ...
In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants. [18] In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor.
History of the Dutch language. Dutch is a West Germanic language, that originated from the Old Frankish dialects. Among the words with which Dutch has enriched the English vocabulary are: brandy, coleslaw, cookie, cruiser, dock, easel, freight, landscape, spook, stoop, and yacht. Dutch is noteworthy as the language of an outstanding literature ...