The languages of Europe
In Europe there are languages which had once just about disappeared but have recently made a comeback (such as Tatar in the Crimea, spoken by a people who underwent deportation); languages which have been brought by newcomers (such as Chinese); languages which have been created out of existant ones by societies as a means of social identification and cohesion (such as Luxembourgish, originally a local variant of German); and languages which people want to revive (such as Cornish). There are also, unfortunately, languages which are disappearing (such as Aragonese). All in all, it is hard to say how many languages are spoken in Europe.
At all events, it seems fair to say that the number of languages spoken in Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals – but not including the Caucasus – is around seventy, not including the different sign languages used by the various communities of deaf people nor all the languages which the new Europeans who have come from around the world use on a daily basis.
The majority of these seventy languages belong to the Indo-European family, which means they have a common origin and hence are similar to each other, even though these similarities – for example between Italian and Swedish – can very often only be detected by specialists as at first sight they are by no means obvious. There are also languages in Europe from the Uralic (such as Finnish, Estonian, Saami and Hungarian) and Altaic (such as Turkish and Tatar) families, and even a language from the Afro-Asiatic family, Maltese, which is related to Arabic, and a language which has no known family, namely Basque.
Indo-European languages in Europe include the Baltic (Latvian and Lithuanian), Celtic (such as Irish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton), Slavic (such as Russian, Polish, Sorbian and Macedonian), Germanic (such as English, German, Frisian and Icelandic) and Romance (such as Catalan, Romanian, Spanish and Languedocien) languages together with Greek, Albanian and Romani, the Indo-Iranian language spoken by many European gypsies.
European languages have borrowed words from each other – and, of course, from languages from other continents – throughout history in what has proved to be a fruitful relationship. Thus just to give one example, Turkish has provided a large number of European languages with words such as caviar and yoghurt. The word sauna, to be found in many languages, comes from Finnish.
The main challenge which European societies need to confront today is how to continue to maintain that linguistic diversity which, in spite of significant cultural unity, they have always featured together with the languages of immigrants which currently are of such great importance. This means finding supranational communication formulas which do not favour the hegemony of any particular language and also supporting all those languages on the continent which, for economic or political reasons, find themselves in a position of weakness which threatens their very survival.
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