Europe how many languages are there

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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Amanda Briney. Geography Expert. Amanda Briney, M. Updated April 02, Cite this Article Format. Briney, Amanda. It will set you apart from the stereotypical clueless tourist who expects to be catered to. Furthermore, having the safety net of English puts you in a lower-risk situation and invites you to try harder, to be even more ambitious in your target language.

So get started today! How about that? First, it proves that learning another language is very doable. If the Europeans can do it, so can everybody else. Second, it means that English-speaking language learners can easily find language exchange partners in Europe. There are plenty of technology tools like Skype and a host of great language exchange websites that can help you do this. How did they become so good at so many languages?

And these numbers are only climbing over the years. It means Europeans have been socialized to be bilinguals and trilinguals. Sure, there are language schools all over the place, but the best way to learn a language, as the survey found with Europeans, is in the routines of everyday life.

Europe, as a result of geography and of the history of migrations, has evolved into a multi-cultural and multi-language society. Not everyone can grow up in that kind of immersive environment, though, where borrowing sugar from your next-door neighbor also functions as a language lesson.

So learners from other parts of the world make do with the next best thing: online immersion. There have been many other examples of genocide and forced assimilation throughout history that have placed minority language speakers in even more oppressive circumstances.

But even if a local language is not regarded as inferior, increased mobility and globalization are contributing toward the disappearance of languages — and by the way, so is climate change. If these two decide to start a family together, chances are high that their children will not grow up with all four languages.

Moreover, maintaining a language is also a question of cost for a nation. Not every country can afford to maintain an entire public apparatus and mass media in two languages, let alone several languages.

We only need to think of all the public signs, forms, applications, administrators, police officers, doctors, newspapers, television channels…the list is endless. All of these things would have to be multilingual, or the people concerned would at least have to have extensive knowledge of the other languages.

However, one academic database currently lists extinct languages. A great example of preserving a language can be found in Toulouse in the south of France. As the capital of the region of Occitania, the metro system was set up in two languages: all stops are announced in French and then in Occitan, a Romance language with only about , native speakers left in France. And Occitan often does not sound so different from French, perhaps a bit like a mix of French and Spanish. Although in the future, fewer and fewer people will grow up learning Occitan as their native language, it is still at least possible this way to ensure that it remains a second language in this region thanks to these kinds of initiatives.

There are also numerous organizations deep in the trenches of language revitalization work, such as Wikitongues and the Endangered Langauge Alliance. Try Babbel. Toggle Menu. Ready to learn? Pick a language to get started!