Languages of Europe

Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each and together account for close to 90% of Europeans. Smaller phyla of Indo-European found in Europe include Hellenic (Greek, 13 million), Baltic ( 7 million), Albanian ( 5 million), Celtic ( 4 million), and Armenian ( 4 million); Indo-Aryan, though a large subfamily of Indo-European, has a relatively small number of speakers in Europe (Romani, 1.5 million). Of the approximately 45 million Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, most speak languages within either the Uralic or Turkic families. Still smaller groups — such as Basque (language isolate), Semitic languages (Maltese, 0.5 million), and various languages of the Caucasus — account for less than 1% of the European population among them. Immigration has added sizeable communities of speakers of African and Asian languages, amounting to about 4% of the population, with Arabic being the most widely spoken of them. Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, French, Italian, German, and English. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe.) Indo-European languages and List of Indo-European languages The Indo-European language family is descended from Proto-Indo-European, which is believed to have been spoken thousands of years ago. Early speakers of Indo-European daughter languages most likely expanded into Europe with the incipient Bronze Age, around 4,000 years ago (Bell-Beaker culture). The Germanic languages make up the predominant language family in Western, Northern and Central Europe.

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Capitalization

Capitalization (American English) or capitalisation (British English) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term also may refer to the choice of the casing applied to text. Conventional writing systems (orthographies) for different languages have different conventions for capitalization, for example, the capitalization of titles. Conventions also vary, to a lesser extent, between different style guides.

Tunisian Arabic

Tunisian Arabic, or simply Tunisian, is a set of dialects of Maghrebi Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It is known among its over 11 million speakers as Tounsi ˈtunsi, "Tunisian" or Derja "Everyday Language" to distinguish it from Modern Standard Arabic, the official language of Tunisia. Tunisian Arabic is mostly similar to eastern Algerian Arabic and western Libyan Arabic. As part of a dialect continuum, Tunisian merges into Algerian Arabic and Libyan Arabic at the borders of the country.

Italian language

Italian (italiano itaˈljaːno or lingua italiana ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), and is the primary language of Vatican City. It has official minority status in Croatia and in some areas of Slovenian Istria.

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