European Day of Languages 2020

It is estimated that there are between 200 and 300 indigenous languages in Europe, probably between 220 and 230.

German is the official language (or one of the official languages) of all of them.

Russian and Bulgarian are written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Cuneiform was used for over 3000 years throughout the Near East by such cultures as the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites.

There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today.

The word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek Alphabet - alpha and beta.

With 1.1 billion total speakers, English is the most widely spoken language in the world

Basque is considered to be the oldest European language spoken today.

The word tulip comes from the Turkish word 'tülbend', which means 'turban'. Tulips were exported to West Europe around 1560.

The region around the Italian town Abella (close to Naples) was known for its delicious apples, which led to the designation of the fruit name apple. Now, many European languages have a name for apples that are linked to the town name of Abella, cf. German Apfel, Icelandic epli, Swedish äple, Irish ubull, Dutch appel, Breton aval, Latvian ābols, Czech jablko and many more.

The primary and official language of Azerbaijan is Azerbaijani, Azeri, a Turkic language closely related to and partially mutually intelligible with Modern Turkish.

Welsh and Breton belong to the group of Celtic languages.

Romanian, Catalan and Sardinian are Romance languages.

A language of southern Africa, derived from the form of Dutch brought to the Cape by Protestant settlers in the 17th century, and an official language of South Africa.

Germanic languages, which belong to the branch of Indo-European languages, generally fall into two groups: West Germanic and North Germanic (also referred to as Scandinavian). North Germanic languages include Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese; languages belonging to the West Germanic group are English, German, Yiddish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian and Gothic, which is extinct today.

Maltese originated from Arabic. Maltese first developed at the time the Arab’s conquest of Malta in 870 and is therefore a direct descendent of Arabic. Yet, Maltese grew apart from its Arabic predecessor due to the subsequent historical developments.

Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language.

The artificial language (AL) Esperanto was founded by the Polish oculist Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. It was first published in Russian in 1887 under the title ‘An International Language’ using the pseudonym ‘Doktoro Esperanto’ (‘Doctor Hopeful’).

Latvian and Lithuanian are Baltic languages. Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language and Polish is a Slavic language.

Romani belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family. It is thus related to Sanskrit/ Prakrit and to Hindi, Bengali, Panjabi, Marathi.

The Asian continent has the largest percentage in terms of the number of languages spoken, which is 32%. About 2,300 languages are spoken across the continent. The Africa continent follows closely with 30%.

About 1.1 billion speak English — that's 20% of the Earth's population. However, most of those people are not native English speakers. About 360 million people speak English as their first language.

The Latin alphabet was borrowed from the Etruscan language.

The vast majority of EU languages belong to the Indo-European family, the three dominant subfamilies being the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic. Germanic languages are spoken in central and northern Europe and include Danish, Dutch, English, German, and Swedish.

The longest word in the Finnish language, that is not a compound word, is 'epaejaerjestelmaellistyttaemaettoemyydellaensaekaeaen'. In English, it means 'even with their lack of ability to disorganize'.

Once a word has been used 25,000 times on social networking sites and such like, GLM declares it a new word. By their calculations a new word is created in English every 98 minutes, hence the estimate that the millionth word is about to be created.

Alpha (Α or α) and omega (Ω or ω) are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet

A reverse dictionary is a dictionary listing words alphabetically from their last letter.

Hebrew and Arabic are written from right to left. Japanese, traditionally, is written from top to bottom (and then right to left). Maltese is written from left to right