Linguistic Maps Of Europe | Languages Of Europe

Below are represented 10 distinct maps which showcase the languages spoken in Europe. According to the mainstream linguistic classification, in Europe there are 6 major Indo-European language families, namely Romance, Slavic, Germanic, Baltic, Celtic, and Hellenic (alongside a non-Indo-European family, specifically the Finno-Ugric linguistic branch which comprises Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian).

Beside the aforementioned branches, there are also Albanian and Basque (each acting as a separate linguistic family of its own). Unlike Albanian (which is an Indo-European language), Basque is an isolated language spoken in northern Spain and southern France with no certain roots discovered to date.

Some of these maps are based on ethnic criterion, others solely on the linguistic one. The entire major linguistic classification in Europe by linguistic arch is the following one (in no particular order):

Romance languages: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Romansh

Germanic languages: German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Scots, Frisian, Faroese, Elfdalian

Slavic languages: Russian, Serbian, Polish, Croatian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Czech, Belorussian, Macedonian, Bosnian, Montenegrin

Hellenic languages: Greek (including Cypriot Greek)

Albanian

Finno-Ugric languages: Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian

Baltic languages: Latvian and Lithuanian

Celtic languages: Irish, Breton, Manx, Cornish, Welsh, Scottish Gaellic

Statistics by number of native speakers worldwide (top 5 for each linguistic family):

Romance languages

Spanish (410 million speakers) Portuguese (250 million speakers) French (75 million speakers) Italian (60 million speakers) Romanian (24 million speakers)

Germanic languages

English (360 million speakers) German (100 million speakers) Dutch (23 million speakers) Swedish (9 million speakers) Danish (5.5 million speakers)

Slavic languages

Russian (155 million speakers) Polish (40 million speakers) Ukrainian (30 million speakers) Serbo-Croatian (19 million speakers) Czech (10 million speakers)

Baltic languages

Lithuanian (3 million speakers) Latvian (1.75 million speakers)

You can also type a word and map it using this application which will automatically detect the language and highlight the geographical area in which the respective idiom is spoken.