European languages | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-11-05

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
European languages

Listening is a more natural way of learning, when compared to reading. Written
language only began at around 3200 BC, but spoken language has existed long ago.

Learning by listening is a great way to:
- increases imagination and understanding
- improves your listening skills
- improves your own spoken accent
- learn while on the move
- reduce eye strain

Now learn the vast amount of general knowledge available on Wikipedia through
audio (audio article). You could even learn subconsciously by playing the audio
while you are sleeping! If you are planning to listen a lot, you could try using
a bone conduction headphone, or a standard speaker instead of an earphone.


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This video uses Google TTS en-US-Standard-D voice.



SUMMARY
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Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. 
Out of a total population of 740 million (as of 2010), some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language;
within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Slavic, Romance and Germanic, with more than 200 million speakers each, between them accounting for close to 90% of Europeans. Smaller phyla of Indo-European found in Europe include Hellenic (Greek, c. 10 million), Baltic (c. 7 million), Albanian (c. 5 million), Indo-Aryan (Romani, c. 1.5 million) and Celtic (including Welsh, c. 1 million). 
Of c. 45 million Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, around 20 million each fall within the Uralic and Turkic families. Still smaller groups (such as Basque and various languages of the Caucasus) account for less than 1% of European population between them. Immigration has added sizeable communities of speakers of African and Asian languages, amounting to about 4% of the population, with Arabic being the most widely spoken of them.
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, German, French, Italian and English. While Russian has the largest number of native speakers (more than 100 million in Europe), English in Europe has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second language.