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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 ...
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 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.
Georgian ( ქართული ენა, kartuli ena, pronounced [ˈkʰartʰuli ˈena]) is the most widely spoken Kartvelian language; it serves as the literary language or lingua franca for speakers of related languages. [ 2] It is the official language of Georgia and the native or primary language of 88% of its population. [ 3]
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 .
The modern names for various Romance-speaking people in Continental Europe (e.g. Walloons, Valaisans, Vlachs/Wallachians, and Włosi, the Polish name for Italians) have a similar etymology. [24] The Welsh term for the language, Cymraeg, descends from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning 'compatriots' or 'fellow countrymen'. [25]
According to the 2006 Irish census figures, there are 1.66 million people in Ireland with some ability to speak Irish, out of a population of 4.6 million, though only 538,500 use Irish on a daily basis (counting those who use it mainly in the education system) and just over 72,000 use Irish as a daily language outside the education system.