Languages of Europe
Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language; within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are "Romance", "Germanic", and "Slavic" 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, 13 million), Baltic ( 7 million), Albanian ( 5 million), Celtic ( 4 million), Armenian ( 4 million) and Indo-Aryan (Romani, 1.5 million). Of the approximately 45 million  Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, most speak languages within either the "Uralic" or "Turkic" families. Still smaller groups (such as Basque, Semitic languages, and various languages of the Caucasus) account for less than 1% of the 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, French, Italian, German, and English. Russian is the most spoken native language in Europe; 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".) Indo-European languages. The Indo-European language family is descended from Proto-Indo-European, which is believed to have been spoken thousands of years ago. Early speakers of Indo-European daughter languages most likely expanded into Europe with the incipient Bronze Age, around 4,000 years ago (Bell-Beaker culture). Germanic. The Germanic languages make up the predominant language family in Western, Northern and Central Europe. An estimated 210 million Europeans are native speakers of Germanic languages, the  largest groups being German ( 95 million), English ( 70 million), Dutch ( 24 million), Swedish ( 10 million), Danish ( 6 million), and Norwegian ( 5 million). There are two extant major sub-divisions: "West Germanic" and "North Germanic". A third group, East Germanic, is now extinct; the only known surviving East Germanic texts are written in the Gothic language. West Germanic is divided into Anglo-Frisian (including English), Low German, Low Franconian (including Dutch) and High German (including Standard German). Anglo-Frisian. The Anglo-Frisian language family is now mostly represented by English (Anglic), descended from the Old English language spoken by the Anglo -Saxons: The Frisian languages are spoken by about 500,000 Frisians, who live on the southern coast of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. These languages include West Frisian, East Frisian (only surviving dialect of it is Saterlandic) and North Frisian. Dutch. Dutch is spoken throughout the Netherlands, the northern half of Belgium, as well as the Nord-Pas de Calais region of France. The traditional dialects of the Lower Rhine region of Germany, are linguistically more closely related to Dutch than to modern German. In Belgian and French contexts, Dutch is sometimes referred to as Flemish. Dutch dialects  are varied and cut across national borders. German. German is spoken throughout Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, much of Switzerland (including the northeast areas bordering on Germany and Austria), northern Italy (South Tyrol), Luxembourg, and the East Cantons of Belgium. There are several groups of German dialects: North Germanic (Scandinavian). The "North Germanic languages" are spoken in Scandinavian countries and include Danish (Denmark), Norwegian (Norway), Swedish (Sweden and parts of Finland), or Elfdalian (in a small part of central Sweden), Faroese (Faroe Islands), and Icelandic (Iceland). English has a long history of contact with Scandinavian languages, given the immigration of Scandinavians early  in the history of Britain, and shares various features with the Scandinavian languages. Even so, especially Swedish, but also Danish and Norwegian, have strong vocabulary connections to the German language. Romance. Roughly 215 million Europeans (primarily in Southern and Western Europe) are native speakers of Romance languages, the largest groups including: French ( 72 million), Italian ( 65 million), Spanish ( 40 million), Romanian ( 24 million), Portuguese ( 10 million), Catalan ( 7 million), Sicilian ( 5 million, also subsumed under Italian), Venetian ( 4 million), Galician ( 2 million), Sardinian ( 1 million), Occitan ( 500,000), besides numerous smaller communities. The Romance languages evolved from varieties of Vulgar Latin  spoken in the various parts of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity. Latin was itself part of the (otherwise extinct) Italic branch of Indo-European. Romance languages are divided phylogenetically into "Italo-Western", "Eastern Romance" (including Romanian) and "Sardinian". The Romance-speaking area of Europe is occasionally referred to as "Latin Europe". We can further break down Italo-Western into the "Italo-Dalmatian languages" (sometimes grouped with Eastern Romance), including the Tuscan-derived Italian and numerous local Romance languages in Italy as well as Dalmatian, and the "Western Romance languages". The Western Romance languages in turn separate into the Gallo -Romance languages, including French and its varieties (Langues d'oïl), the Rhaeto-Romance languages and the Gallo-Italic languages; the Occitano-Romance languages, grouped with either Gallo-Romance or East Iberian, including Occitan, Catalan and Aragonese; and finally the West Iberian languages (Spanish-Portuguese), including the Astur-Leonese languages, Galician-Portuguese, and Castilian. Slavic. Slavic languages are spoken in large areas of Southern, Central and Eastern Europe. An estimated 250 million Europeans are native speakers of Slavic languages, the largest groups being Russian ( 110 million in European Russia and adjacent parts of Eastern Europe, Russian forming the largest linguistic community in  Europe), Polish ( 45 million), Ukrainian ( 40 million), Serbo-Croatian ( 21 million), Czech ( 11 million), Bulgarian ( 9 million), Slovak ( 5 million) Belarusian and Slovene ( 3 million each) and Macedonian ( 2 million). Phylogenetically, Slavic is divided into three subgroups: Non-Indo-European languages. Uralic. Uralic is native to northern Eurasia. Finno-Ugric groups the Uralic languages other than Samoyedic. Finnic languages include Finnish ( 5 million), Estonian ( 1 million) and Mari (c. 400,000). The Sami languages ( 30,000) are closely related to Finnic. The Ugric languages are represented in Europe with the Hungarian language ( 13 million), historically introduced with the Hungarian conquest of the  Carpathian Basin of the 9th century. The Samoyedic Nenets language is spoken in Nenets Autonomous Okrug of Russia, located in the far northeastern corner of Europe (as delimited by the Ural Mountains). Sign languages. Several dozen manual languages exist across Europe, with the most widespread sign language family being the Francosign languages, with its languages found in countries from Iberia to the Balkans and the Baltics. Accurate historical information of sign and tactile languages is difficult to come by, with folk histories noting the existence signing communities across Europe hundreds of years ago. British Sign Language (BSL) and French Sign  Language (LSF) are probably the oldest confirmed, continuously-spoken sign languages. Alongside German Sign Language (DGS) according to Ethnologue, these three have the most numbers of signers, though very few institutions take appropriate statistics on contemporary signing populations, making legitimate data hard to find. Notably, few European sign languages have overt connections with the local majority/oral languages, aside from standard language contact and borrowing, meaning grammatically the sign languages and the oral languages of Europe are quite distinct from one another. Due to (visual/aural) modality differences, most sign languages are named for the larger ethnic nation in which  they are spoken, plus the words "sign language", rendering what is spoken across much of France, Wallonia and Romandy as French Sign Language or LSF for: "langue des signes française". Recognition of non-oral languages varies widely from region to region. Some countries afford legal recognition, even to official on a state level, whereas others continue to be actively suppressed. The major sign linguistic families are: History of standardization. Language and identity, standardization processes. In the Middle Ages the two most important defining elements of Europe were "Christianitas" and "Latinitas". The earliest dictionaries were glossaries: more or less structured lists  of lexical pairs (in alphabetical order or according to conceptual fields). The Latin-German (Latin-Bavarian) "Abrogans" was among the first. A new wave of lexicography can be seen from the late 15th century onwards (after the introduction of the printing press, with the growing interest in standardisation of languages). The concept of the nation state began to emerge in the early modern period. Nations adopted particular dialects as their national language. This, together with improved communications, led to official efforts to standardise the national language, and a number of language academies were established: 1582 "Accademia della Crusca" in Florence , 1617 "Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft" in Weimar, 1635 "Académie française" in Paris, 1713 "Real Academia Española" in Madrid. Language became increasingly linked to nation as opposed to culture, and was also used to promote religious and ethnic identity: e.g. different Bible translations in the same language for Catholics and Protestants. The first languages whose standardisation was promoted included Italian ("questione della lingua": Modern Tuscan/Florentine vs. Old Tuscan/Florentine vs. Venetian → Modern Florentine + archaic Tuscan + Upper Italian), French (the standard is based on Parisian), English (the standard is based on the London dialect) and (High) German (based on the  dialects of the chancellery of Meissen in Saxony, Middle German, and the chancellery of Prague in Bohemia ("Common German")). But several other nations also began to develop a standard variety in the 16th century. Lingua franca. Europe has had a number of languages that were considered linguae francae over some ranges for some periods according to some historians. Typically in the rise of a national language the new language becomes a lingua franca to peoples in the range of the future nation until the consolidation and unification phases. If the nation becomes internationally influential, its language may become a lingua  franca among nations that speak their own national languages. Europe has had no lingua franca ranging over its entire territory spoken by all or most of its populations during any historical period. Some linguae francae of past and present over some of its regions for some of its populations are: Linguistic minorities. Historical attitudes towards linguistic diversity are illustrated by two French laws: the Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts (1539), which said that every document in France should be written in French (neither in Latin nor in Occitan) and the Loi Toubon (1994), which aimed to eliminate anglicisms from official documents . States and populations within a state have often resorted to war to settle their differences. There have been attempts to prevent such hostilities: two such initiatives were promoted by the Council of Europe, founded in 1949, which affirms the right of minority language speakers to use their language fully and freely. The Council of Europe is committed to protecting linguistic diversity. Currently all European countries except France, Andorra and Turkey have signed the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, while Greece, Iceland and Luxembourg have signed it, but have not ratified it; this framework entered into force in  1998. Another European treaty, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, was adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe: it entered into force in 1998, and while it is legally binding for 24 countries, France, Iceland, Italy, North Macedonia, Moldova and Russia have chosen to sign without ratifying the convention. Scripts. The main scripts used in Europe today are the Latin and Cyrillic. The Greek alphabet was derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and Latin was derived from the Greek via the Old Italic alphabet. In the Early Middle Ages, Ogham was used in Ireland and  runes (derived from Old Italic script) in Scandinavia. Both were replaced in general use by the Latin alphabet by the Late Middle Ages. The Cyrillic script was derived from the Greek with the first texts appearing around 940 AD. Around 1900 there were mainly two typeface variants of the Latin alphabet used in Europe: Antiqua and Fraktur. Fraktur was used most for German, Estonian, Latvian, Norwegian and Danish whereas Antiqua was used for Italian, Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese, English, Romanian, Swedish and Finnish. The Fraktur variant was banned by Hitler in 1941, having been described as "Schwabacher Jewish letters". Other  scripts have historically been in use in Europe, including Phoenician, from which modern Latin letters descend, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on Egyptian artefacts traded during Antiquity, various runic systems used in Northern Europe preceding Christianisation, and Arabic during the era of the Ottoman Empire. Hungarian rovás was used by the Hungarian people in the early Middle Ages, but it was gradually replaced with the Latin-based Hungarian alphabet when Hungary became a kingdom, though it was revived in the 20th century and has certain marginal, but growing area of usage since then. European Union. The European Union (as of 2021) had  27 member states accounting for a population of 447 million, or about 60% of the population of Europe. The European Union has designated by agreement with the member states 24 languages as "official and working": Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. This designation provides member states with two "entitlements": the member state may communicate with the EU in any of the designated languages, and view "EU regulations and other legislative documents" in that language. The European Union and the Council of  Europe have been collaborating in education of member populations in languages for "the promotion of plurilingualism" among EU member states. The joint document, "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR)", is an educational standard defining "the competencies necessary for communication" and related knowledge for the benefit of educators in setting up educational programs. In a 2005 independent survey requested by the EU's Directorate-General for Education and Culture regarding the extent to which major European languages were spoken in member states. The results were published in a 2006 document, "Europeans and Their Languages", or "Eurobarometer  243". In this study, statistically relevant samples of the population in each country were asked to fill out a survey form concerning the languages that they spoke with sufficient competency "to be able to have a conversation". List of languages. The following is a table of European languages. The number of speakers as a first or second language (L1 and L2 speakers) listed are speakers in Europe only; see list of languages by number of native speakers and list of languages by total number of speakers for global estimates on numbers of speakers. The list is intended to include any  language variety with an ISO 639 code. However, it omits sign languages. Because the ISO-639-2 and ISO-639-3 codes have different definitions, this means that some communities of speakers may be listed more than once. For instance, speakers of Bavarian are listed both under "Bavarian" (ISO-639-3 code "bar") as well as under "German" (ISO-639-2 code "de"). Languages spoken in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Georgia, and Turkey. There are various definitions of Europe, which may or may not include all or parts of Turkey, Cyprus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. For convenience, the languages and associated statistics for all five  of these countries are grouped together on this page, as they are usually presented at a national, rather than subnational, level. Immigrant communities. Recent (post–1945) immigration to Europe introduced substantial communities of speakers of non-European languages. The largest such communities include Arabic speakers (see Arabs in Europe) and Turkish speakers (beyond European Turkey and the historical sphere of influence of the Ottoman Empire, see Turks in Europe). Armenians, Berbers, and Kurds have diaspora communities of 1–2,000,000 each. The various languages of Africa and languages of India form numerous smaller diaspora communities.