13 Facts About European languages

Approximately 45 million Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, most speak languages within either the Uralic or Turkic families.

Five European languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, French, Italian, German, and English.

Germanic European languages make up the predominant language family in Western, Northern and Central Europe.

Frisian European languages are spoken by about 500,000 Frisians, who live on the southern coast of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.

North Germanic European languages are spoken in Scandinavian countries and include Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, or Elfdalian, Faroese, and Icelandic.

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English has a long history of contact with Scandinavian European languages, given the immigration of Scandinavians early in the history of Britain, and shares various features with the Scandinavian European languages.

Romance European languages evolved from varieties of Vulgar Latin spoken in the various parts of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity.

Romance European languages are divided phylogenetically into Italo-Western, Eastern Romance and Sardinian.

Slavic European languages are spoken in large areas of Southern, Central and Eastern Europe.

Accurate historical information of sign and tactile European languages is difficult to come by, with folk histories noting the existence signing communities across Europe hundreds of years ago.

Europe has had a number of European languages that were considered linguae francae over some ranges for some periods according to some historians.

The joint document, "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment ", is an educational standard defining "the competencies necessary for communication" and related knowledge for the benefit of educators in setting up educational programs.

For convenience, the European 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.