Before 1870, the industrialization that had started to develop in Northwestern and Central Europe and the United States did not extend in any significant way to the rest of the world. Even in Eastern Europe, industrialization lagged far behind. Russia, for example, remained largely rural and agricultural, and its autocratic rulers kept the peasants in serfdom. The concept of Central Europe was already known at the beginning of the 19th century, but its real life began in the 20th century and immediately became an object of intensive interest. However, the very first concept mixed science, politics and economy – it was strictly connected with the intensively growing German economy and its aspirations to dominate a part of European continent called "Mitteleuropa".
Before World War I
Central Europe
Central Europe | Before World War I
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context. Various languages are taught in Central Europe, with certain languages being more popular in different countries. Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context. Various languages are taught in Central Europe, with certain languages being more popular in different countries.
what does the red on the german flag represent
user
Red and white were also colours of the Hanseatic League (13th–17th century). Hanseatic trading ships were identifiable by their red-white pennants, and most Hanseatic cities adopted red and white as their city colours (see Hanseatic flags)
assistant
when was it accepted as the national flag?
user
1848
assistant
what are napoleonic wars?
user
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I.
assistant
what is the league mentioned above?
user
It was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Northwestern and Central Europe.
assistant
when was it founded?
user
late 1100s.
assistant
what can you tell me about the place you mentioned just above?
user
The concept of Central Europe is based on a common historical, social and cultural identity and is a patchwork of territories that are traditionally Catholic and Protestant.
assistant
how was it before ww i?
user
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context.
assistant
what alllanguages are spoken there?
user
The "bible" of the concept was Friedrich Naumann's book "Mitteleuropa" in which he called for an economic federation to be established after World War I. Naumann's idea was that the federation would have at its centre Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire but would also include all European nations outside the Triple Entente. The concept failed after the German defeat in World War I and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. The revival of the idea may be observed during the Hitler era.
Central Europe | Before World War I
The German term denoting Central Europe was so fashionable that other languages started referring to it when indicating territories from Rhine to Vistula, or even Dnieper, and from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans. An example of that-time vision of Central Europe may be seen in J. Partsch's book of 1903. On 21 January 1904, "Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein" (Central European Economic Association) was established in Berlin with economic integration of Germany and Austria–Hungary (with eventual extension to Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands) as its main aim. Another time, the term Central Europe became connected to the German plans of political, economic and cultural domination.
Central Europe | Before World War I
World War II and the expulsion of Germans from many European countries between 1945 and 1950 had a disastrous effect on the use of the German language in Central and Eastern Europe, where it was often suppressed and eventually dropped as a lingua franca by the mid-to-late 20th century being replaced by Russian during the Cold War and nowadays by English.
List of lingua francas | German
German remained an important second language in much of Central and Eastern Europe after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 for a few years. Today, although to a much diminished degree after World War II, it is still a common second language in a few countries which were formerly part of the empire, such as Slovenia (50 % of the population, next to English with 57 %), Croatia (34%), the Czech Republic (28%) and Slovakia (28%). In others, it survived so far as a minor language (in Poland by 18%, in Hungary by 16%), usually after English and Russian, in this order, without being considered a lingua franca anymore.
List of lingua francas | German
Thus, Latin evolved to become a central language in Europe from 27 BC to 476 AD. Secondly, there was the widespread usage of the pre-classical version of Han Chinese in contemporary China due to the unification of China in 221 BC by Qin Shi Huang.
Global language system | Background
Before World War II, all the unclassified languages of Europe and the Near East were commonly referred to as "Asianic languages", and the term encompassed several languages that were later found to be Indo-European (such as Lydian), and others (such as Hurro-Urartian, Hattic) were classified as distinct language families. In 1953, the linguist Johannes Hubschmid identified at least five pre-Indo-European language families in Western Europe: Eurafrican, which covered North Africa, Italy, Spain and France; Hispano-Caucasian, which replaced Eurafrican and stretched from Northern Spain to the Caucasus Mountains; Iberian, which was spoken by most of Spain prior to the Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula; Libyan, which was spoken mostly in North Africa but encroached into Sardinia; and Etruscan, which was spoken in Northern Italy.
Pre-Indo-European languages | Terminology
Various languages are taught in Central Europe, with certain languages being more popular in different countries.
Central Europe | Languages
In Europe, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the use of both local and learned languages declined as the central governments of the different states imposed their vernacular language as the standard throughout education and official use (this was the case in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy and Greece, and to some extent, in Germany and Austria-Hungary). In the last few decades, local nationalism and human rights movements have made a more multicultural policy standard in European states; sharp condemnation of the earlier practices of suppressing regional languages was expressed in the use of such terms as "linguicide".
Language revitalization | Europe
Other Romance languages derive their word for "yes" from the classical Latin "sic," "thus", such as the Italian "sì", Spanish and Catalan "sí", Portuguese "sim", and even French "si" (used when contradicting another's negative assertion). Sardinian is an exception in that its word for "yes", "eja", is from neither origin. Similarly Romanian uses "da" for "yes", which is of Slavic origin. However, neither "lingua romana" nor "langue d'oïl" referred, at their respective time, to a single homogeneous language but to mutually intelligible linguistic varieties. In those times, spoken languages in Western Europe were not codified (except Latin and Medieval Latin), the region's population was considerably lower than today, and population centers were more isolated from each other.
Langues d'oïl | Langue d'oïl
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.
Languages of Europe | Scripts
Possible pronunciation: Translation: "Material civilization, science, and even art unify themselves more and more. The educated European feels himself almost at home in all lands that have European civilization, that is, more and more, in the entire world. Today almost all states war with the same armaments. Without pause the modes of intercommunication improve, and in consequence from that the world seems to decrease. A Parisian is now closer to an Englishman or a German than he was a hundred years before to a French peasant."
Interlingue | Example texts
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:
Languages of Europe | Lingua franca
In the Middle Ages the two most important definitory elements of Europe were "Christianitas" and "Latinitas". Thus language—at least the supranational language—played an elementary role. This changed with the spread of the national languages in official contexts and the rise of a national feeling. Among other things, this led to projects of standardizing national language and gave birth to a number of language academies (e.g. 1582 Accademia della Crusca in Florence, 1617 Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, 1635 Académie française, 1713 Real Academia de la Lengua in Madrid). "Language" was then (and still is today) more connected with "nation" than with "civilization" (particularly in France).
Eurolinguistics | Language and identity, standardization processes
During and after World War II, the widespread use of Yiddish and German in Eastern Europe came to an end through genocide and deportation, respectively.
Germanic-speaking Europe | History
By the medieval period, only the Semitic, Dravidian, Caucasian, and Uralic languages, and the language isolate Basque remained of the (relatively) indigenous languages of Europe and the western half of Asia.
Indo-European languages | Present distribution
Languages taught as the first language in Central Europe are: Croatian, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romansh, Serbian, Slovak and Slovenian. The most popular language taught at schools in Central Europe as foreign languages are: English, German and French. Proficiency in English is ranked as high or moderate, according to the EF English Proficiency Index: Other languages, also popular (spoken by over 5% as a second language):
List of central European countries by development indexes | Languages
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.
Languages of Europe | Language and identity, standardization processes
The following languages were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula before the Roman occupation and the spread of the Latin language.
Iberian languages | Pre-Roman languages
The following languages were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula in medieval times, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Iberian languages | Medieval languages
Before 1870, the industrialization that had started to develop in Northwestern and Central Europe and the United States did not extend in any significant way to the rest of the world. Even in Eastern Europe, industrialization lagged far behind. Russia, for example, remained largely rural and agricultural, and its autocratic rulers kept the peasants in serfdom. The concept of Central Europe was already known at the beginning of the 19th century, but its real life began in the 20th century and immediately became an object of intensive interest. However, the very first concept mixed science, politics and economy – it was strictly connected with the intensively growing German economy and its aspirations to dominate a part of European continent called "Mitteleuropa".
Central Europe | Before World War I
1001-1051...History of Central Europe
Library of Congress Classification:Class D -- History, General and Old World | DAW - <a href="History%20of%20Central%20Europe">History of Central Europe</a>
The language developed from Vulgar Latin with contributions from the pre-Roman languages which were spoken in the territory of the Astures, an ancient tribe of the Iberian peninsula. Castilian (Spanish) came to the area later in the 14th century when the central administration sent emissaries and functionaries to occupy political and ecclesiastical offices.
Asturleonese language | History
The Peninsular War was followed by the centralization of Spain (Constitutions of 1812, 1837, 1845, 1856, etc.), with only the Basque districts keeping a separate status until 1876. Compulsory education in 1856 made the use of Castilian (Spanish) mandatory, as well as discouraging and forbidding the use of other languages in some social and institutional settings. Franco and his nationalist dictatorship imposed Spanish as the only valid language for any formal social interaction (1937). By the early 21st century, Spanish was the overwhelmingly dominant language in Spain, with Basque, Catalan, and Galician surviving and developing in their respective regions with different levels of recognition since 1980.
Language shift | Spain
In medieval times, it occurred in a wider area, including the Romance languages spoken in most or all of France and Iberia (Old Spanish, Galician-Portuguese, Catalan, French, etc.), as well as in the Old and Middle High German of central and southern Germany, and most likely Northern Germany as well. In all of these languages, the retracted "apico-alveolar" sibilant was opposed to a non-retracted sibilant much like modern English , and in many of them, both voiceless and voiced versions of both sounds occurred. A solid evidence is different spellings used for two different sibilants: in general, the retracted "apico-alveolar" variants were written or , while the non-retracted variants were written , or .
Voiceless alveolar fricative | Medieval
Western European languages mostly fall within two Indo-European language families: the Romance languages, descended from the Latin of the Roman Empire; and the Germanic languages, whose ancestor language (Proto-Germanic) came from southern Scandinavia. Romance languages are spoken primarily in the southern and central part of Western Europe, Germanic languages in the northern part (the British Isles and the Low Countries), as well as a large part of Northern and Central Europe. Other Western European languages include the Celtic group (that is, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton) and Basque, the only currently living European language isolate. Multilingualism and the protection of regional and minority languages are recognized political goals in Western Europe today.
Western Europe | Languages
In Europe, as the domestic market is generally quite restricted, international trade is a norm. But there is no predominant language in Europe (with German spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Belgium; French in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland; and English in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Malta). Most of the time, English is used as a communication language, but in multilingual countries such as Belgium (Dutch, French, and German), Switzerland (German, French, Italian and Romansh), Luxembourg (Luxembourgish, French and German) or Spain (Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician), it is common to see employees mastering two or even three of those languages.
Multilingualism | Europe
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".
Languages of Europe | European Union
In Europe languages with in native words are in a central-western European zone between Cornwall and Poland: English, German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Walloon, Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Wymysorys, Resian and Scandinavian dialects. German, Polish, Wymysorys and Kashubian use it for the voiced labiodental fricative (with Polish, related Kashubian and Wymysorys using Ł for ), and Dutch uses it for . Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in Welsh and Cornish to represent the vowel as well as the related approximant consonant . The following languages historically used for in native words, but later replaced it by : Swedish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Belarusian Łacinka.
W | Other languages
Elias (2020) estimates that the switch would have taken place around 2,500–1,500 BCE.
Central Flores languages | Prehistory
Europe has about 225 indigenous languages, mostly falling within three Indo-European language groups: the Romance languages, derived from the Latin of the Roman Empire; the Germanic languages, whose ancestor language came from southern Scandinavia; and the Slavic languages. Slavic languages are mostly spoken in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe. Romance languages are spoken primarily in Western and Southern Europe as well as in Switzerland in Central Europe and Romania and Moldova in Eastern Europe. Germanic languages are spoken in Western, Northern and Central Europe as well as in Gibraltar and Malta in Southern Europe. Languages in adjacent areas show significant overlaps (such as in English, for example).
Europe | Languages
After the war, the Eastern part of Central Europe was placed at the centre of the concept. At that time the scientists took an interest in the idea: the International Historical Congress in Brussels in 1923 was committed to Central Europe, and the 1933 Congress continued the discussions.
Central Europe | Interwar period
Central Europe is a home to some of world's oldest democracies. However, most of them have been impacted by totalitarianism, particularly Fascism and Nazism. Germany and Italy occupied all Central European countries, except Switzerland. In all occupied countries, the Axis powers suspended democracy and installed puppet regimes loyal to the occupation forces. Also, they forced conquered countries to apply racial laws and formed military forces for helping German and Italian struggle against Communists. After World War II, almost the whole of Central Europe (the Eastern and Middle part) was occupied by Communists. Communism also banned democracy and free elections, and human rights did not exist in Communist countries.
Central Europe | Democracy Index
English is considered to be the global lingua franca. European languages like English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and German are official, co-official or widely in use in many countries with a colonial past or with a European diaspora.
European integration | European languages in the world
In the Middle Ages, it occurred in a wider area, covering Romance languages spoken throughout France, Portugal, and Spain, as well as Old High German and Middle High German.
Voiceless alveolar fricative | Voiceless alveolar sibilants
The expansion of the German Empire briefly expanded the German language outside of Central Europe to areas in Africa and New Guinea. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire and German Empire, German was a high status language spoken by upper middle classes and settlers in large parts of current day Poland, Slovakia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe led to a rapid contraction the German Sprachraum, although not a significant erosion of the language. Dialects from areas where German-speakers were fully displaced largely disappeared, including Silesian German or High Prussian. East Pomeranian survives among small numbers of expellees and their descendants in Iowa, Wisconsin and the Brazilian state of Rondonia.
Evolution of languages | Europe
The cities of Dunkirk, Gravelines and Bourbourg only became predominantly French-speaking by the end of the 19th century. In the countryside, until World War I, many elementary schools continued to teach in Dutch, and the Catholic Church continued to preach and teach the catechism in Dutch in many parishes. During the second half of the 19th century, Dutch was banned from all levels of education by both Prussia and France and lost most of its functions as a cultural language. In both Germany and France, the Dutch standard language is largely absent, and speakers of these Dutch dialects will use German or French in everyday speech.
Dutch language | Europe
German, although it had many different dialects which formed a language continuum from Holland and Flanders in the northwest, through Schleswig in the north across to East Prussia in the northeast, down to Styria and Lower Austria in the southeast and Bern and South Tyrol in the south, served as a lingua franca in large portions of Europe for centuries, mainly within the Holy Roman Empire and the eastern areas of the Kingdom of Prussia (which later included additional areas of previously Polish territory), and later within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and other areas where Germans settled, such as the Baltic States and Transylvania.
World language | German
Their language is a unique dialect of Edo and Esan. They also use Pidgin English, which is a mixture of Portuguese, English and Esan. The majority fluently speak English due to their high levels of education.
Igueben | The area today
Spoken by 12% of the EU population, French is the third most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union, after German and English; it is also the third most widely known language of the Union, after English and German (33% of the EU population report to know how to speak English, whilst 22% of Europeans understand German and 20% French).
Geographical distribution of French speakers | Europe
Standard Modern Greek, which has apical , lacked both processes. The Germanic-speaking regions that did not have either phenomena have normally preserved the apical , that is, Icelandic, Dutch and many Scandinavian lects. It also reached modern times in Low German, but this language has largely been replaced by Standard German. The main Romance language to preserve the sound, Castilian Spanish, is exceptional in that it had both events that produced and , and preserved the apical S at the expense of both, that were shifted farther away. Galician changed only , and Catalan, as well as Ladino, still preserves all three sounds.
Voiceless alveolar fricative | Exceptions
The cities soon became mostly Swedish-speaking while the native tongues still maintained a strong stance in rural areas and minor towns for many decades to come. The native tongues were gradually weakened as an urbanization process went on and TV and radio broadcasts were exclusively in standard Swedish, making the native tongues appear backward.
Westrobothnian | History
From the start of the 20th century until 1946 80% of Jews lived in Europe but by the end of World War II this was reduced to 25%, however after the war over 50% of Jews now lived in the Americas. This change was aided by Jewish emigration groups such as the Hilfsverein deutschsprechender Juden (later to become Asociación Filantrópica Israelita) which was based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The majority of German minorities in Latin America – as well as elsewhere around the world – experienced a decline in the use of the German language, with the exception of Brazil, where the dialect Riograndenser Hunsrückisch is being taught in schools and in some media, totaling over 200 thousand speakers spread over the Brazilian southern states.
Geographical distribution of German speakers | Latin America
It had a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual structure, some of the smaller ethnicities existing and languages used at different times in certain areas were Dutch (also a West Germanic language which was similar to German dialects spoken to the east of it), Italian, French, Czech, and Polish.
Germans | Medieval period
In 1860, before schooling was made compulsory, native Occitan speakers represented more than 39% of the whole French population, as opposed to 52% of francophones proper; their share of the population declined to 26–36% by late 1920s, Since the end of World War II, it experienced another sharp decline, to less than 7% by 1993.
Vergonha | Introduction
For millennia, Latin served as a "lingua franca" for administrative, scholarly, religious, political, and other purposes in parts of the present-day European Union. After Athens and other Greek city-states of the 6th to 4th centuries BC, the first documented political entity historically verifiable in Europe was the Roman Republic, traditionally founded in 509 BC, the successor-state to the Etruscan city-state confederacies. Latin as a "lingua franca" of Europe was rivalled only by Greek. It still served as the official language in some universities in the 20th century, and has operated as the official language of the Roman Catholic Church until today.
Languages of the European Union | Latin
According to de Swaan, the global language system has been constantly evolving since the time period of the early 'military-agrarian' regimes. Under these regimes, the rulers imposed their own language and so the first 'central' languages emerged, linking the peripheral languages of the agrarian communities via bilingual speakers to the language of the conquerors. Then was the formation of empires, which resulted in the next stage of integration of the world language system. Firstly, Latin emerged from Rome. Under the rule of the Roman Empire, which ruled an extensive group of states, the usage of Latin stretched along the Mediterranean coast, the southern half of Europe, and more sparsely to the North and then into the Germanic and Celtic lands.
Global language system | Background
There is no direct evidence of the languages spoken in the Neolithic. Paleolinguistic attempts to extend the methods of historical linguistics to the Stone Age have little academic support. Donald Ringe, criticizing scenarios that envision only a small number of Neolithic language families spread over huge areas of Europe, has argued on general principles of language geography applying to "tribal" pre-state societies, and the scant remains of non-Indo-European languages attested in ancient inscriptions, that Neolithic Europe must have been a place of great linguistic diversity, with many language families having no recoverable linguistic links to one another, much like western North America before European colonisation.
Paleo-European languages | Neolithic
In that atmosphere it seems imperative to express how closely one feels connected to representatives of these nations. This is understandable, but it cannot all merge into a notion of "Central Europe" that could be misunderstood as taking up the old concept again, which is, as I have said, no longer realizable. In a word, I think the effort to latch on to the connections torn apart in 1945, because of the outcome of the war, and then in turn because of the Cold War, is a sensible political task, especially for West Germans.
Historikerstreit | Interview with Andreas Hillgruber, 31 October 1986
As for Europe, there seems to be a great arc where the sound (and/or its unvoiced variant) is present. Most of Mainland Europe lacks the sound. However, some "periphery" languages as Gascon, Welsh, English, Icelandic, Elfdalian, Kven, Northern Sami, Inari Sami, Skolt Sami, Ume Sami, Mari, Greek, Albanian, Sardinian, some dialects of Basque and most speakers of Spanish have the sound in their consonant inventories, as phonemes or allophones.
Voiced dental fricative | Introduction
His theories enjoyed a certain celebrity in their time but have since been criticised. Albeit intriguing to the ear, they are no longer considered worthy of deeper scholarly scrutiny in most of contemporary linguistic research centres and communities. They were popular among Turkish nationalists under Atatürk in the 1930s: the Sun Language Theory (Güneş Dil Teorisi), based on "L'origine des langues, des religions et des peuples", claimed that all languages were derived from a common Central Asian root, a paleontological "proto-language" that can be established only hypothetically. Not only the Turkic languages, spoken in Central Asia and Turkey today, but also the Maya (in Mesoamerica) and the extinct Sumerian (as seen on tablets excavated in Mesopotamia, in the Middle East) would be related.
Hilaire de Barenton | Legacy
In Europe—e.g. thanks to the European Charter of Regional and Minority Language—some languages are in quite a strong position, in the sense that they are given special status, such as Basque, Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Rhaeto-Romance/Romansh and Romani, native language of the Roma/Gypsies in southern Europe), whereas others are in a rather weak position (e.g. Frisian, Scottish Gaelic, Turkish, Saami/Lappish, Sorbian/Wendish and Yiddish, the once common language of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe). Especially allochthonous minority languages are not given official status in the EU. Some minor languages don't even have a standard yet, i.e. they have not even reached the level of an ausbausprache yet, which could be changed, e.g., if these languages were given official status.
Eurolinguistics | Linguistic minorities
According to the 2011 census, 96.47% of the population speak German, 3.18% Italian and 0.34% Ladin as first language.
Olang | Linguistic distribution
("See English language in Europe".)
Languages of Europe | Introduction
Similarly in Europe and the Urals the Uralic languages (such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian etc) remain, as does Basque, a pre-Indo-European Isolate. Despite being unaware of their common linguistic origin, diverse groups of Indo-European speakers continued to culturally dominate and often replace the indigenous languages of the western two-thirds of Eurasia. By the beginning of the Common Era, Indo-European peoples controlled almost the entirety of this area: the Celts western and central Europe, the Romans southern Europe, the Germanic peoples northern Europe, the Slavs eastern Europe, the Iranian peoples most of western and central Asia and parts of eastern Europe, and the Indo-Aryan peoples in the Indian subcontinent, with the Tocharians inhabiting the Indo-European frontier in western China.
Indo-European languages | Present distribution
The written linguistic record in Europe first begins with the Mycenaean record of early Greek in the Late Bronze Age. Unattested languages spoken in Europe in the Bronze and Iron Ages are the object of reconstruction in the field of historical linguistics, in the case of Europe predominantly Indo-European linguistics. Indo-European is assumed to have spread from the Pontic steppe at the very beginning of the Bronze Age, reaching Western Europe contemporary with the Beaker culture, after about 5,000 years ago. Various pre-Indo-European substrates have been postulated, but remain speculative; the "Pelasgian" and "Tyrsenian" substrates of the Mediterranean world, an "Old European" (which may itself have been an early form of Indo-European), a "Vasconic" substrate ancestral to the modern Basque language, or a more widespread presence of early Finno-Ugric languages in northern Europe.
Prehistoric Europe | Linguistic history
During the political decline of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, there were large-scale migrations into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by Huns. These incursions isolated the Vlachs from the rest of Romance-speaking Europe. British and African Romance—the forms of Vulgar Latin used in Britain and the Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population—disappeared in the Middle Ages (as did Pannonian Romance in what is now Hungary, and Moselle Romance in Germany).
Romance languages | Fall of the Western Roman Empire
German served as a lingua franca in portions of Europe for centuries, mainly the Holy Roman Empire outside of the sphere of influence of the Hanseatic League, which used "Low German", and to a lesser extent in Eastern Europe where the Polish Empire and the Russian Empire dominated, and South-Eastern Europe where the Ottoman Empire was the dominant cultural influence over the centuries. In fact, the Romantic movement with Goethe and Schiller at its top, at the end of the 18th century, served as a rediscovery of the German language for the German people that used, at this point, largely French as a lingua franca like almost all European regions, but German can be indeed still considered as a lingua franca though with far less importance than French until the 20th century or English today.
List of lingua francas | German
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 the 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.
Languages of Europe | Scripts
The Paleo-European languages, or Old European languages, are the mostly unknown languages that were spoken in Europe prior to the spread of the Indo-European and Uralic families caused by the Bronze Age invasion from the Eurasian steppe of pastoralists whose descendant languages dominate the continent today. The term Old European languages is also often used more narrowly to refer only to the unknown languages of the first Neolithic European farmers in Southern, Western and Central Europe and the Balkan Peninsula, who emigrated from Anatolia around 9000–6000 BC, excluding unknown languages of various European hunter gatherers who were eventually absorbed by farming populations by the late Neolithic Age.
Paleo-European languages | Introduction
Writing was introduced to Europe by the Greeks, and from there also brought to the Romans (6th century BC). There are four alphabets in regular use in the areas generally considered Europe. The Latin alphabet was developed into several scripts. In the early years of Europe, the Carolingian minuscules were the most important variety of the Latin script. From this two branches developed, the Gothic/Fracture/German tradition, which Germans used well into the 20th century, and the Italian/Italic/Antiqua/Latin tradition, still used. For some nations the integration into Europe meant giving up older scripts, e.g. the Germanic gave up the runes (Futhark) (3rd to 17th centuries), the Irish the Ogham script (4th to 7th centuries).
Eurolinguistics | Writing systems
National or official languages: English, Welsh, French (regional).
List of linguistic rights in European constitutions | <a href="United%20Kingdom">United Kingdom</a>
According to the 2011 census, 97.77% of the population speak German, 2.14% Italian and 0.10% Ladin as first language.
Ratschings | Linguistic distribution
Turkish is still in use and widely spoken in several areas formerly part of the Ottoman Empire and may be understood by older people in other parts of the Middle East.
List of lingua francas | Turkish
How far the Gallo-Romance languages spread varies a great deal depending on which languages are included in the group. Those included in its narrowest definition (i.e. the Langues d'oïl and Arpitan) were historically spoken in the north of France, parts of Flanders, Alsace, part of Lorraine, the Wallonia region of Belgium, the Channel Islands, parts of Switzerland, and northern Italy. Today, a single Gallo-Romance language (French) dominates much of this geographic region (including the formerly non-Romance areas of France) and has also spread overseas. At its broadest, the area also encompasses southern France, Catalonia, the Valencian Country and the Balearic islands in eastern Spain, and much of northern Italy.
Gallo-Romance languages | Traditional geographical extension
Prior to 1803, German-speaking Central Europe included more than 300 political entities, most of which were part of the Holy Roman Empire or the extensive Habsburg hereditary dominions. They ranged in size from the small and complex territories of the princely Hohenlohe family branches to sizable, well-defined territories such as the Kingdoms of Bavaria and Prussia. Their governance varied: they included free imperial cities, also of different sizes, such as the powerful Augsburg and the minuscule Weil der Stadt; ecclesiastical territories, also of varying sizes and influence, such as the wealthy Abbey of Reichenau and the powerful Archbishopric of Cologne; and dynastic states such as Württemberg.
Unification of Germany | German-speaking Central Europe in the early 19th century
Since by definition officials of the "new" Member States were recruited after the enlargement, these new conditions affected all of them (although they also affect nationals of the former 15 Member States who have been recruited after 1 May 2004). Before the 2004 enlargement, the EU had twelve treaty languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. However, due to the 2004 enlargement, nine new official languages were added: Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Hungarian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Maltese.
2004 enlargement of the European Union | Impact
Multilingualism for the EU is linked to worker mobility and the European economy. The European Union spends more than €30 million a year promoting language learning and linguistic diversity through the "Socrates" and "Leonardo da Vinci" programmes, a policy that began with the pioneering "Lingua programme" in 1990.
European Day of Languages | Multilingualism today
The next level constitutes about 100 central languages, spoken by 95% of the world's population and generally used in education, media and administration. Typically, they are the 'national' and official languages of the ruling state. These are the languages of record, and much of what has been said and written in those languages is saved in newspaper reports, minutes and proceedings, stored in archives, included in history books, collections of the 'classics', of folk talks and folk ways, increasingly recorded on electronic media and thus conserved for posterity. Many speakers of central languages are multilingual because they are either native speakers of a peripheral language and have acquired the central language, or they are native speakers of the central language and have learned a supercentral language.
Global language system | Central languages
The central vowel is the default epenthetic vowel of the language and almost totally predictable in its occurrence. Likewise, , normally an allophone of , is fossilized in some words and might be justified as a separate phoneme.
Awngi language | Vowels
The consensus in contemporary historical and political literature is that the results of the language census have to be interpreted with caution. The questions were alternatively on "known" languages or on the "usual" language, the most often spoken. Some considered this to refer to their mother tongue, while for others it referred to the prestigious and ubiquitous language that was French. Moreover, the censuses of 1920 and 1947 were performed in a post-war climate. Dutch, being closely related with German, was discredited due to collaborationism of certain wings of the Flemish Movement with the German occupation. French on the other hand enjoyed the status of the language of victory.
Peeters directive | History
EuroVoc, a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union, has entries for "23 EU languages" ("Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech", Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, "Hungarian", Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, "Polish", Portuguese, "Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian", Spanish and Swedish), plus the languages of candidate countries ("Albanian", "Macedonian" and "Serbian"). Of these, those in italics are classified as Central and Eastern Europe in this source.
Eastern Europe | EuroVoc
French is still a lingua franca in most Western and Central African countries and an official language of many, a remnant of French and Belgian colonialism. These African countries and others are members of the Francophonie. French is the official language of the Universal Postal Union, with English added as a working language in 1994.
List of lingua francas | French
The last complete linguistic census of 1947 indicated that over one quarter of the population used French as the "Language exclusively or most frequently spoken".
Rekkem | Languages
The language of education was Latin until 1844, when Hungarian was introduced as an exclusive official language. Women have been allowed to enroll since 1895.
Eötvös Loránd University | History
According to the 2011 census, 96.83% of the population speak German, 3.04% Italian and 0.14% Ladin as first language.
Naturns | Linguistic distribution
This section is dedicated to the diversity of languages, their evolution and their alphabets. On the ceiling, there are 3D tree models showing the generally accepted genealogies of the major language families (Indo-European, Amerindian, Altaic, Chamito-Semitic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, etc.). There is also a globe showing the geographic distribution of these language families. Visuals and audios explain the different ways in which languages evolve and influence one another, along with the idea of language policies.
Mundolingua | Languages: Past and Present
Nonetheless, it has been controversially hypothesised that Eurasian languages are all related and form the Nostratic languages with an early common ancestor existing just after the end of the LGM. In 2013, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel and colleagues postulated that among Nostratic languages, frequently used words more often have speculated cognates, and that this was evidence that 23 identified words were "ultraconserved" and supposedly changed very little in use and pronunciation, descending from a common ancestor about 15,000 years ago at the end of the LGM. Archaeologist Paul Heggarty said that Pagel's data was subjective interpretation of supposed cognates, and the extreme volatility of sound and pronunciation of words (for example, Latin [akam] "water" → French [o] in just 2,000 years) makes it unclear if cognates can even be identified that far back if they do indeed exist.
European early modern humans | Language
The Germans pointed out that most inhabitants of the German Empire identified not as Germans, but in regional terms as Prussians or Bavarians and the like. Multilingual countries like Germany and Spain also could not claim a common language as a defining characteristic of the nation nor did members of the same nation share the same values or experiences, syndicalists in Spain and Germany argued. Syndicalists also argued against the notion that the war was a clash of different cultures or that it could be justified as a defense of civilization. Various cultures were not mutually hostile, they claimed, and the state should not be seen as the embodiment of culture, since culture was the product of the entire population, while the state acted in the interests of just a few.
Syndicalism | World War I
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.
Languages of Europe | Linguistic minorities
There is no direct evidence of the languages spoken in the Neolithic. Some proponents of paleolinguistics attempt to extend the methods of historical linguistics to the Stone Age, but this has little academic support. Criticising scenarios which envision for the Neolithic only a small number of language families spread over huge areas of Europe (as in modern times), Donald Ringe has argued on general principles of language geography (as concerns "tribal", pre-state societies), and the scant remains of (apparently indigenous) non-Indo-European languages attested in ancient inscriptions, that Neolithic Europe must have been a place of great linguistic diversity, with many language families with no recoverable linguistic links to each other, much like western North America prior to European colonisation.
Neolithic Europe | Language
Celtiberian or Northeastern Hispano-Celtic is an extinct Indo-European language of the Celtic branch spoken by the Celtiberians in an area of the Iberian Peninsula between the headwaters of the Douro, Tagus, Júcar and Turia rivers and the Ebro river. This language is directly attested in nearly 200 inscriptions dated to the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, mainly in Celtiberian script, a direct adaptation of the northeastern Iberian script, but also in the Latin alphabet. The longest extant Celtiberian inscriptions are those on three Botorrita plaques, bronze plaques from Botorrita near Zaragoza, dating to the early 1st century BC, labelled Botorrita I, III and IV (Botorrita II is in Latin).
Celtiberian language | Introduction
Almost all languages native to modern-day Europe are Indo-European in origin, with the exceptions of Basque, the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian languages and the Uralic languages. The residents of Neolithic Europe prior to the migration of the Yamnaya or Indo-Europeans, referred to as Old Europeans, spoke several ancient languages and families, such as the Vasconic languages, Etruscan and Pre-Greek, among others. However, as a result of their extinction, most of the linguistic diversity in Europe is endogenous to Indo-European, and exists solely as a consequence of its further subdivision. The extant subdivisions are as follows, ordered chronologically and provided according to the current understandings of the steppe theory:
Language migration | Europe
With the growth of the Spanish Empire, Spanish became established in the Americas, as well as in parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania. It became the language of global trade until Napoleonic Wars and the breakup of the Spanish Empire at the beginning of the 19th century. Spanish was used as a lingua franca throughout the former Spanish Colonial Empire, including territory in present-day U.S., but particularly in present-day Mexico, Spanish Caribbean, Central, South America and the Philippines, and still remains the lingua franca within Hispanic America. At present it is the second most used language in international trade, and the third most used in politics, diplomacy and culture after English and French.
List of lingua francas | Spanish
The working language of the European Central Bank is English.
Languages of the European Union | European Central Bank
There are about 225 indigenous languages in Europe – roughly 3% of the world's total. Most of the European languages are of Indo-European origin. Since the end of the 18th century, the most widespread language of Europe (both in terms of geography and the number of native speakers) has been Russian, which replaced French. Counting only native speakers, approximately 150 million Europeans speak Russian on a daily basis, followed by German (approx. 95 mil.), Turkish (approx. 80 mil.), English and French (each by 65 mil.), Italian ( by 60 mil.), Spanish and Polish (40 mil. each), Ukrainian (30 mil.) and Romanian (26 mil.).
European Day of Languages | Languages of Europe
It contributed to moribundness and extinction of some local dialects like Silesian German, High Prussian, or East Pomeranian dialects. It also damaged the language's status in Central-Western and Central-Southern Europe, where anti-German sentiment became even greater than before the war.
History of German | Introduction
Its presence in many branches of Indo-European and its presence particularly in the more conservative languages inside each branch (e.g. Icelandic, Spanish), as well as being found in disparate areas, such as the Baltic languages and Greece, suggests it could have ultimately been the main allophone of Proto-Indo-European s, known for ranging from to as far as . , but not , was developed in Italian. However, where Spanish and Catalan have apical , Italian uses the same laminal that occurs in standard forms of English: evidence, it could be argued, that S was not pronounced apically in Latin. But Neapolitan has a medieval S becoming either or depending on context, much as in European Portuguese, which could attest to the previous existence of in the Italian Peninsula.
Voiceless alveolar fricative | Reach in ancient times
Three linguae francae are prominent in European history: Linguae francae that were less widespread, but still played a comparatively important role in European history are: The first type of dictionary was the glossary, a more or less structured list of lexical pairs (in alphabetical order or according to conceptual fields). The Latin-German (Latin-Bavarian) Abrogans was among the first of these. 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 standardizing languages).
Eurolinguistics | Linguae Francae
Up to roughly 1340, the Romance languages spoken in the Middle Ages in the northern half of what is today France are collectively known as "ancien français" ("Old French") or "langues d'oïl" (languages where one says "oïl" to mean "yes"); following the Germanic invasions of France in the fifth century, these Northern dialects had developed distinctly different phonetic and syntactical structures from the languages spoken in southern France. The language in southern France is known as "langue d'oc" or the Occitan language family (a language where one says "oc" to mean "yes"), also known under the name of one of its dialects, the Provençal language).
Medieval French literature | Language
This also implied that words belonging to particular cultures should be imported without modifications, which De Wahl believed brought new ideas of value to European culture that had become "sick" after the First World War. He cited the terms "karma", "ko-tau" (kowtow), "geisha", and "mahdí" in 1924 as examples of those that should not be put in a "vocalic corset" through obligatory endings (e.g. "karmo, koŭtoŭo," "gejŝo, madho" in Esperanto")" when imported into the international language: "Such words, still not large in number, have seen a large increase in the past century, and in the future will grow in exorbitant proportion when, through international communication, the ideas of stable Oriental cultures will inundate and influence the sick Europe, which is now losing its equilibrium.
Interlingue | Language philosophy
It was spoken until the 13th century.
Romance-speaking Africa | Introduction
France is the origin of two laws, or decrees, concerning language: the Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts (1239), which says that every document in France should be written in French (i.e. not in Latin nor Occitan) and the French Loi Toubon, which aims at eliminating Anglicisms from official documents. But a characteristic feature of Europe is linguistic diversity and tolerance, which is not only shown by the European Charta of Regional and Minority Languages. An illustrative proof of the promotion of linguistic diversity in the Middle Ages is the translation school in Toledo, Spain, founded in the 12th century (in medieval Toledo the Christian, the Jewish and the Arab civilizations lived together remarkably peacefully).
Eurolinguistics | Issues in language politics
Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin during the medieval period. The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members. Alexander Gode, who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua, characterized it as "Standard Average European". The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE "Sprachbund". Of all European languages only French and German show all the criteria that constitute Standard Average European, i.e.
Standard Average European | Overview
Recognizable strands in the contemporary ideas on universal languages took form only in Early Modern Europe. In the early 17th century some believed that a universal language would facilitate greater unity among mankind largely due to the subsequent spread of religion, specifically Christianity, as espoused in the works of Comenius. But there were ideas of a universal language apart from religion as well. A "lingua franca" or trade language was nothing very new; but an international auxiliary language was a natural wish in light of the gradual decline of Latin. Literature in vernacular languages became more prominent with the Renaissance.
Universal language | Early modern history
Before World War II, East-Central Europe generally lacked clearly shaped ethnic settlement areas. There were some ethnic-majority areas, but there were also vast mixed areas and abundant smaller pockets settled by various ethnicities. Within these areas of diversity, including the major cities of Central and Eastern Europe, regular interaction among various ethnic groups had taken place on a daily basis for centuries, while not always harmoniously, on every civic and economic level. With the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, the ethnicity of citizens became an issue in territorial claims, the self-perception/identity of states, and claims of ethnic superiority.
Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950) | Background
The Spanish and Portuguese colonization of South America had the linguistic effect of widening the geographical location of some of wide spread languages in Pre-Columbian era (mostly Quechua, Aymara, Guarani and Tupi). These were the main means of communication between natives and Europeans, they allowed to articulate new economic and administrative areas. Described as 'general', these languages worked as interfaces between the colonial administration and the aboriginal people and almost exclusive mean of evangelization.
LANGAS | Project
Following World War II, large parts of Europe that were culturally and historically Western became part of the Eastern bloc. Czech author Milan Kundera (emigrant to France) thus wrote in 1984 about the "Tragedy of Central Europe" in the New York Review of Books. The boundary between the two blocks was called the Iron Curtain. Consequently, the English term "Central Europe" was increasingly applied only to the westernmost former Warsaw Pact countries (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary) to specify them as communist states that were culturally tied to Western Europe. This usage continued after the end of the Warsaw Pact when these countries started to undergo transition.
Central Europe | Central Europe behind the Iron Curtain
It was the language that the majority of the men spoke. If, as in the case of the 100th Infantry in Krakau, the unit was made up of 27% Germans, 33% Czechs and 37% Poles, there were three regimental languages. Every officer had to learn the regimental language within three years. In all, there were 11 officially recognized languages in the k.u.k. monarchy.
Common Army | Languages
Polish was a lingua franca in areas of Central and Eastern Europe, especially regions that belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Polish was for several centuries the main language spoken by the ruling classes in Lithuania and Ukraine, and the modern state of Belarus. After the Partitions of Poland and the incorporation of most of the Polish areas into the Russian Empire as Congress Poland, the Russian language almost completely supplanted Polish.
List of lingua francas | Polish
"Language" was also used to create a feeling of "religious/ethnic identity" (e.g. different Bible translations by Catholics and Protestants of the same language). Among the first standardization discussions and processes are the ones for Italian ("questione della lingua": Modern Tuscan/Florentine vs. Old Tuscan/Florentine vs. Venetian > Modern Florentine + archaic Tuscan + Upper Italian), French (standard is based on Parisian), English (standard is based on the London dialect) and (High) German (based on: chancellery of Meißen/Saxony + Middle German + chancellery of Prague/Bohemia ["Common German"]). But also a number of other nations began to look for and develop a standard variety in the 16th century.
Eurolinguistics | Language and identity, standardization processes