Autonomy and heteronomyAutonomy and heteronomy are complementary attributes of a language variety describing its functional relationship with related varieties. The concepts were introduced by William A. Stewart in 1968, and provide a way of distinguishing a language from a dialect. A variety is said to be autonomous if it has an independent cultural status. This may occur if the variety is structurally different from all others, a situation Heinz Kloss called abstand. Thus language isolates such as Basque are necessarily autonomous.
SprachraumIn linguistics, a sprachraum (ˈsprɑːkraʊm; ˈʃpʁaːxˌʁaʊm, "language area", plural sprachräume) is a geographical region where a common first language (mother tongue), with dialect varieties, or group of languages is spoken. Many sprachräume are separated by national borders, whilst others are separated by oceans or ethnolinguistic boundaries. The five major Western sprachräume (by number of speakers) are those of English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German.
German dialectsGerman dialects are the various traditional local varieties of the German language. Though varied by region, those of the southern half of Germany beneath the Benrath line are dominated by the geographical spread of the High German consonant shift, and the dialect continuum that connects German to the neighboring varieties of Low Franconian (Dutch) and Frisian. The varieties of German are conventionally grouped into Upper German, Central German and Low German; Upper and Central German form the High German subgroup.
Languages of EuropeMost 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.
