Today's question was about how many languages are spoken in Europe. The info I have gathered says anywhere from over 200 to an exact number of 230. I was really surprised. There is also some debate as to what actually qualifies as a language. By definition, a language is "the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community" per Webster's definition. Using this definition, then I can see how there would be so many. Even within Germany, the dialects are so strong in some areas, that they cannot be understood by other Germans, and would thus qualify as their own language, and surely the people here think of it this way because they claim to speak Allgäuer, Deutsch (German), and to some level English, French, Spanish and/or Italian that they learned in school. The local immigrants also retain their home language as well, so there is a good but of Turkish spoken in the region along with Russian, Polish, Indian dialects, Chinese dialects, Arabic and Czech. All of the boxes for items we buy have usually a minimum of 6 languages printed on the package. Unfortunately, only about 1/3 of the time is English one of those languages.
The general language families spoken in Europe are 1) Indo-European, which includes Slavic languages - Russia, Poland and many former USSR states; Germanic - German, English, Icelandic, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian; Romance - French, Italian, Spanish and the likes; Greek; Albanian; Baltic - Lithuanian and Latvian are examples; Armenian; Indo-Iranian - Kurdish, for example; and Celtic - Welsh and Irish and Scottish Gaelics; 2) Finno-Ugric
- Hungarian and Finnish, among others; 3) Altaic, which includes the Turkish varieties; 4 - 6) three different versions of Caucasian - surprisingly these are also languages of the former USSR states such as Georgia (seeing as how white Americans have to put Caucasian on ethnicity forms, I would have thought this was for English); 7) Basque - spoken in isolated regions of the Pyrenees (kids - can you find the Pyrenees mountain range on the map?); and 8) Maltese - spoken in Malta, it is the only language still written in the standard Latin alphabet and has the smallest number of speakers for an official EU language.So the EU doesn't just accept all of these languages? Nope - in fact, there are only 23 officially recognized languages: "Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish." And all important documents pertaining to the EU are translated into each of these languages. German is the mostly widely spoken native language followed by English (which is actually spoken by more people as a common language), Italian, and French. More than half of all people in the EU can speak more than one language (imagine if we could do that in the US!) There are three different types of alphabets used to write the EU documents: Cyrillic, Greek, and our Latin-based alphabet. Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and four regionally spoken Spanish languages (including Basque) are supported for local citizens in communication with EU institutions, but they are not considered as official languages.
Is there a language that is a "one size fits all" language? There has been an attempt to come up with a single language that all could use to communicate. This language is called Esperanto. It was first put forth in 1887 by an eye doctor named Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof from what is modern day Poland. (Over the course of his life he learned or dabbled in 12 different languages - all but 3 he learned fluently!) Esperanto means "one who hopes" and was Zamenhof's attempt to create a way for all peoples to communicate with each other so that peace could come over all nations. This language is still in use today and has anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million speakers, with 1000 people calling it their native tongue. There is even an Esperanto Wikipedia that has over 100,000 documents in the language. In San Marino, there is a university that even uses it as the language of instruction (German is the language of instruction for my children, and English is your language of instruction.) Although the hope that this language would flourish has not come to pass, there are many who continue the cause. To see a glimpse of what Esperanto looks like, you can visit the World Esperanto Association at http://www.uea.org/index.html.
The word for today is language: die Sprache (shpra che - make that cat sound on the ch.)
The question for today is "What is a Münster?"
Auf Wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
