To redeem this offer simply quote promo code 60041. Important families include the British, French, and German sign language families. [30], Irish is the only official language of the EU that is not the most widely spoken language in any member state. The European Commission has also supported some initiatives to produce digital technologies that can better support signers, such as Dicta-Sign and SignSpeak.[55]. It’s the official language of Germany, Austria, Belgium and it’s one of four official languages in Switzerland. On 26 February 2016 it was made public that Cyprus has asked to make Turkish an official EU language, in a “gesture” that could help reunification and improve EU–Turkey relations. If you’re going to Europe and plan on visiting multiple countries, how do you decide what phrases to learn? [21] It was agreed that the council could extend this transitional period by an additional year, but decided not to. Thanks to our friends at. Official Languages of the European Union To be an official language of the European Union, the language must be both an official and a working language within a member state. Europa:Languages and Europe. That, along with the fact that 45 million Europeans claim Spanish as their mother tongue, is reason enough to start learning this language. https://www.theintrepidguide.com/how-many-languages-are-there-in-the-world [36] However, many other languages other than Italian and the above-mentioned twelve are spoken across the country,[37] most of them being either Gallo-Italic or Italo-Dalmatian. But what do people speak in Europe? To encourage the member states to cooperate and to disseminate best practice the Commission issued a Communication on 24 July 2003, on Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: an Action Plan 2004–2006 and a Communication on 22 November 2005, on A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism. The Sami have at least 180 different words for snow and ice. In the table, boxes coloured light blue mean that the language is an official language of the country, while the main language spoken in the country is coloured dark blue. "With 20 Official Languages, Is EU Lost in Translation?". These include Luxembourgish, an official language of Luxembourg since 1984, and Turkish, an official language of Cyprus. The European Parliament, on the other hand, has members who need working documents in their own languages, so its document flow is fully multilingual from the outset. Spoken in: Parts of Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden Number of native speakers: 30,000 Sámi is a group of closely-related languages spoken by the Sámi people. The most widely understood language in the EU is English, which is understood by 44% of all adults, while German is the most widely used mother tongue, spoken by 18%. Although Basque, Catalan/Valencian and Galician are not nationwide official languages in Spain, as co-official languages in the respective regions – pursuant to Spanish constitution, among other documents – they are eligible to benefit from official use in EU institutions under the terms of 13 June 2005 resolution of the Council of the European Union. We rank the Top 10. Furthermore, legislation specifically concerning the Sami must be translated to these languages. The national language of Ukraine is spoken by 45 million native speakers, with the majority residing in Europe. Russian, German, French, Italian, and English are the official languages of many European countries. Italian is naturally the official language of Italy, but it’s also a co-official language of Switzerland (it’s the third most spoken language by the Swiss, after German and French) and of Vatican City, the city-state for the Roman Catholic Church (conveniently landlocked by Rome, Italy). Within France, Metropolitan French is spoken in major cities such as Paris and Marseille, whereas a slightly different dialect known as Meridional French is often used in regional areas. In total, 22 million Europeans speak Dutch as their mother tongue, meaning that around 5% of the European population is a Dutch native speaker. Most of Sami speakers speak Northern Sami (5,000–6,000 speakers), although there are ca. [51] In the EU, language policy is the responsibility of member states, and the European Union does not have a common "language policy". It’s the official language of Russia and Belarus, but it’s also still widely used in many eastern European countries (where it was taught in school during the Soviet Era). As a Babbel subscriber you’ll enjoy a 10% discount on any Intrepid trip departing before December 31, 2018. Van der Jeught, Stefaan (2015). [2] One language (Irish) previously had the lower status of "treaty language" before being upgraded to an official and working language in 2007, although it has been temporarily derogated as a working language until 2022 due to difficulty in finding qualified translators and interpreters. Rules governing the languages in the institutions", "COM(2003)449: Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: an Action Plan 2004–2006", "EUROPA – Education and Training – Action Plan Promoting language learning and linguistic diversity", European parliament has 24 official languages, but MEPs prefer English, English will remain the working language of the EU after Brexit, English will not be an official EU language after Brexit, says senior MEP, Britain is leaving the EU, but its language will stay, "EUR-Lex - 01958R0001-20130701 - EN - EUR-Lex", "Languages of Europe – Official EU languages", "Federal law on the legal status of Austrian minorities", "National minorities andminority languages". 1.2. Bonne journée (Have a nice day) 3. The European Parliament translates its proceedings into all official languages so that fellow MEPs can understand them better than if they had the delayed translation. Some of them may have some official status within the member state and count many more speakers than some of the lesser-used official languages. Regional & minority languages. The Spanish governments have sought to give some official status in the EU for the languages of the autonomous communities of Spain, Catalan/Valencian, Galician and Basque. [62] Following estimates there are approximately 100,000 Europeans sometimes using Esperanto (and several millions having learned Esperanto); the language has several thousand native speakers, some of them of the second or third generation. Ready to discover the magic of Europe for yourself? [22] All new acts of the institutions were required to be adopted and published in Maltese from 30 April 2007. The cost of translation, interpretation, publication, and legal services involved in making Irish an official EU language is estimated at just under €3.5 million a year. Those unfamiliar with Europe may be surprised to know that Germany also has a large population of Turkish speakers — more than 2 million people, in fact! [39], On 16 November 2005, the President Peter Straub of the Committee of the Regions signed an agreement with the Spanish Ambassador to the EU, Carlos Bastarreche [es], approving the use of Spanish regional languages in an EU institution for the first time in a meeting on that day, with interpretation provided by European Commission interpreters. You might be surprised. Based on the principle of subsidiarity, European Union institutions play a supporting role in this field, promoting cooperation between the member states and promoting the European dimension in the member states' language policies, particularly through the teaching and dissemination of the languages of the member states (Article 149.2). The EU asserts that it is in favour of linguistic diversity. The Slavic languages are to be found in central Europe and the Balkans in southern Europe. The EU is home to over 60 indigenous regional or minority languages, spoken by some 40 million people. About this Worksheet. Some countries have Chinatowns. Which are the most important? There are many Russian-speaking immigrants in Germany[53] and France. French is an official language in all three of the cities that are political centres of the Union: Brussels (Belgium), Strasbourg (France) and Luxembourg City (Luxembourg). 2003. This article presents an overview of European Union (EU) statistics related to self-reported foreign language skills. The two exceptions are Greek, which is written in the Greek script, and Bulgarian, which is written in Cyrillic script. Deirdre Fottrell, Bill Bowring – 1999 Minority and Group Rights in the New Millennium. It may not be a dominant language globally (having only 80 million speakers), but it is one of the top 2 most spoken languages in Europe. Yet when it comes to deciding which language to learn for your vacation, all of these choices make for a difficult decision. However, the EU Parliament has stated clearly that language education is the responsibility of member states. English remains by far the most widely spoken foreign language throughout Europe. It is one of the official languages of Ireland, along with Irish, … Répondre à ces difficultés tout en faisant évoluer ce cursus, l’un des plus attractifs de la filière LEA, pour lui donner plus de visibilité encore et augmenter ainsi les chances de nos étudiants sur le marché du travail européen et mondial a … [26] However, a derogation stipulates that not all documents have to be translated into Irish as is the case with the other official languages. Ukraine is actually the largest country by area in Europe (when one excludes France’s overseas territories and the asian continental portion of Russia). Harald Haarmann (2002, Kleines Lexikon der Sprachen. Co-official in certain municipalities in the region of. Collectively, almost 10% of the European population speaks Polish as a first, second or third language. About 80% of the population speak French as a second language, while 16% consider it a native language. In Hungary it is officially recognised by the Ministry of Education as a foreign language;[58] and examinations in Esperanto may be used to meet the requirements of knowledge of foreign languages needed to complete university or high school. They include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, and Slovene. The EU used to provide the main financial support to the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages until 2010, a non-governmental organisation which represents the interests of the over 40 million citizens who belong to a regional and minority language community, and for the Mercator networks of universities active in research on lesser-used languages in Europe. Plurilingualism has been identified in numerous Recommendations of the Council of Europe as the principle and the aim of language education policies, and is . UK and Ireland not so much, Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe - 2012 Edition, European Coal and Steel Community (1951–2002), European Economic Community (1958–1993/2009), Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification, Cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, Largest cities by population within city limits, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Languages_of_the_European_Union&oldid=1014651440, Articles with Latvian-language sources (lv), Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing potentially dated statements from July 2013, All articles containing potentially dated statements, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2020, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from June 2020, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2011, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2010, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. A genome-wide analysis of 69 ancient Europeans reveals the history of population migrations around the time that Indo-European languages arose in Europe, when there was a … 56% of citizens in the EU member states are able to hold a conversation in one language apart from their native language. To a lesser extent, this legacy also holds true among the older generation in parts of the EU that were formerly part of the Eastern bloc, such as the GDR. FAQ: Is every document generated by the EU translated into all the official languages? language taught and the proportions of pupils learning it are fast approaching those found in the European Union. Galician in particular, not being itself a European Parliament official language, can be used and is in fact used by some European Parliament constituents as a spoken dialect of Portuguese due to its similarity with this language. Only 5% of Turks, 13% of Irish, 16% of Italians, 17% of Spaniards and 18% of Britons speak at least two languages apart from their native language. Three different Sami languages are spoken in Sweden, but "Sami language" (undifferentiated) is recognised as an official minority language in Sweden, and is co-official with Swedish in four municipalities in Norrbotten County (Swedish Lapland). On the Linguistic Design of Multinational Courts—The French Capture, forthcoming in 14 INT’L J. CONST. Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language Taras Kremin stated that in 2021 Ukraine is negotiating with the European Association of Language Institutions. Geographically we typically define it as the land mass stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caucasus Mountains in Russia — with an area of only 4 million square miles, it’s the second smallest continent on Earth. On the other hand, English is spreading in europe as one of the main language. Those who live in southern European countries or countries where one of the major European languages is a state language have a lower likelihood of speaking multiple foreign languages. Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, and Swedish are all official languages at the national level in multiple countries (see table above). [73] The German Bundestag has repeatedly called for German to receive an equal position in the EU Commission alongside English and French. Arabic is spoken in many EU countries mainly in its Maghrebi and Levantine varieties. In Finland, the Sami languages Northern Sami (ca. The Sámi languages are in the same family as Finnish. [80][81] The rules governing the languages of the institutions of the Community shall, without prejudice to the provisions contained in the Statute of the Court of Justice, be determined by the council, acting unanimously (Article 290). If EU institutions have sufficient available translation capacity, and if no other Council regulations state otherwise, the derogation completely ends by January 2022. Since 1997, the Culture 2000 programme has financed the translation of around 2,000 literary works from and into European languages. Go to main content; Go to navigation path; Go to language selector; Go to site tools This situation has … [5] Though the EU has very limited influence in this area, as the content of educational systems is the responsibility of individual member states, a number of EU funding programmes actively promote language learning and linguistic diversity.[6]. 2nd ed. Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. In the European Union, language policy is the responsibility of member states, and EU does not have a common language policy; European Union institutions play a supporting role in this field, based on the principle of "subsidiarity"; they promote a European dimension in the member states' language policies. Almost half of the world’s population claims one of only 10 languages as their mother tongue. At 20% of the total number of speakers, German is the most widely spoken native language, followed by French, Italian and Spanish. This can be a tricky challenge for those wanting to pick up Russian as a foreign language, but it doesn’t hinder the millions of individuals that claim it as their mother tongue. Maghrebi Arabic is spoken by migrants in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Most official EU languages are written in the Latin script. So all of these descriptors are what we mean when we speak about Europe. If you consider the percentage of the population that learned French as a second language, then over 30% of European inhabitants know the language, making it a great choice for those that want to travel around the continent. Do you like the map? The 667th Council Meeting of the Council of the European Union in Luxembourg on 13 June 2005, decided to authorise limited use at EU level of languages recognised by member states other than the official working languages. Other documents—e.g., communications with the national authorities, decisions addressed to particular individuals or entities and correspondence—are translated only into the languages needed. The judges deliberate in French, pleadings and written legal submissions are translated into French, and the judgment is drafted in French. They are based on the conclusions of the Grin Report,[64] which concluded that it would hypothetically allow savings to the EU of €25 billion a year (€54 for every citizen) and have other benefits. It’s possible to look at European languages as belonging to two major groupings: Indo-European, which includes Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Slavic and the Romance languages (e.g., Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian). The EU encourages all its citizens to be multilingual; specifically, it encourages them to be able to speak two languages in addition to their native language. Sharing with attribution helps me create more maps. Leading European Countries In Language Learning Luxembourg . was originally drawn up or was translated due to enlargement, are legally equally authentic. Furthermore, not all national languages have been accorded the status of official EU languages. [46], Luxembourgish (Luxembourg) and Turkish (Cyprus) are the only two national languages that are not official languages of the EU. The French constitution stipulates French as the sole language of France. Perhaps a surprise for many individuals, Russian tops this list as the most spoken language in Europe with 120 million native speakers on the continent! All languages of the EU are also working languages. 1 This does not refer to the total population of the countries.2 40% of those who speak French are native speakers, for a total of 85%.3 Includes about 30% native speakers4 Includes more than 30% native speakers. L. (2016), MATHILDE COHEN, Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market, accession of Bulgaria to the European Union, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, European Parliament § Translation and interpretation, European Court of Justice § Procedure and working languages, European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages, European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, European Commissioner for Education and Culture, European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism, European Commissioner for Multilingualism, Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union, "European Commission - PRESS RELEASES - Press release - Frequently asked questions on languages in Europe", "Publications Office — Interinstitutional style guide — 7.2.4. On the list of the five most spoken languages in Europe, there is one member of the Germanic languages, German. As of 1 July 2013 , the official languages of the European Union, as stipulated in the latest amendment of Regulation No 1 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community of 1958, are: Surprisingly, there are over 150 different languages spoken in this small continent. Start learning a language for your next trip today! Ça fait longtemps (Long time no see) 2. Before joining Babbel in 2015, she had been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. [56], Several NGOs exist which support signers, such as the European Union of the Deaf and the European Sign Language Centre. For years now, Spain has enjoyed a covetable position as one of Europe’s best travel destinations — especially for other Europeans looking for a warm and relaxing summer vacation. When you combine the number of immigrants living in Europe and the number of second-hand English speakers, you’ll have no problem getting around Europe with English. English. [24] It was also possible to correspond in written Irish with the EU Institutions. As a result, Kyiv will be able to gain associate membership by the end of 2021. Under the European Company Regulation, companies can be incorporated as Societas Europaea (Latin for "European Company", often shortened to "SE" after the company's own proper name). The knowledge of foreign languages varies considerably in the specific countries, as the table below shows. [citation needed]. The five most spoken languages in the EU are English (44%), German (36%), French (29%), Italian (18%) and Spanish (17%). Italian is the official language of Italy, San Marino, Vatican City, and Croatia. star Easy apply. Irish was also listed in that treaty and all subsequent EU treaties as one of the authentic languages of the treaties. The most spoken second or foreign languages in the EU are English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian. Minority Languages in Europe: Frameworks, Status, Prospects. Beck. Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands but also enjoys co-official status in Belgium. 5 Most Popular Languages Spoken in Europe Russian. This new regulation outlines an actual schedule of gradual reduction spread across five years starting from 2016. Youth exchanges, town twinning projects, and the European Voluntary Service also promote multilingualism. Some 94% of the total population of European are native speakers of an Indo-European language. However, despite being the first official language of Ireland and having been accorded minority-language status in the Northern Ireland region of the United Kingdom, then an EU member state, Irish was not made an official working language of the EU until 1 January 2007. Almost half of the respondents—44%—do not know any other language than their native language. The vast majority of EU languages belong to the Indo-European family: the three dominant subfamilies are the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic. The designation of Irish as a "treaty language" meant that only the treaties of the European Union were translated into Irish, whereas Legal Acts of the European Union adopted under the treaties (like Directives and Regulations) did not have to be. Roughly 69% use German as a second language. [60] 30 years ago, in 1990 there were only 2083 Esperanto speakers in Hungary following the census. Spanish’s prestige grows even more when leaving Europe: 20 countries have Spanish declared as an official language and over 480 million individuals are Spanish native speakers throughout the globe, making it the second most widely-spoken language in the world. The languages of the European Union are languages used by people within the member states of the European Union (EU). Most of these individuals (naturally) live in Poland, but Polish is also widely spoken in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Belarus and Ukraine. Au contraire! It is the official language of France (of course), as well as a co-official language of Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Though not an official language of the European Union, Russian is widely spoken in all member states that were part of the Soviet Union (and before that the Russian Empire). What are the working languages of the European Commission? In 19 out of 29 countries polled, English is the most widely known language apart from the native language, this being particularly the case in Sweden (89%), Malta (88%); the Netherlands (87%); and Denmark (86%). Luxembourgish is the national language and the official language alongside German and French. Although Maltese is an official language, the Council set a transitional period of three years from 1 May 2004, during which the institutions were not obliged to draft all acts in Maltese. trip departing before December 31, 2018. As of 1 July 2013[update], the official languages of the European Union, as stipulated in the latest amendment of Regulation No 1 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community of 1958, are:[11][12]. Until such a body is established the agreement will not become effective; so far the body has not been created nor there is any budget allocated to this end. [55] None of these languages are recognised as an official language of an EU member state, with the exception of Ireland passing the Irish Sign Language Act 2017 that granted it official status alongside Irish and English, and only two states (Finland and Portugal) refer to sign languages in their constitution. For millennia, Latin served as a lingua franca for administrative, scholarly, religious, political, and other purposes in parts of the present-day European Union. Although not an EU treaty, most EU member states have ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.[82]. We’ll break down the 10 most widely spoken languages in Europe, so you can decide which one is the most practical for your travels. FAQ: What does the EU's policy of multilingualism cost? ", https://www.politico.eu/article/we-will-all-be-speaking-german-soon-language-brussels/?utm_campaign=Brussel%20Inside&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter, "Appendix 5: Written Evidence of Advocate General Sharpston", Consolidated version of the Treaty establishing the European Community, Articles 149 to 150, European Parliament Fact Sheets: 4.16.3.