Surprising facts about Europe's languages

Europe packs a remarkable number of languages into a fairly small area. Most belong to the same large family, but their histories are full of odd turns. A few that are worth knowing, whether you're a learner or just curious.

Most European languages are distant relatives

Spanish, French, German, Russian, Greek, Hindi and Persian are all members of the Indo-European family, descended from a common ancestor spoken thousands of years ago. That's why you can spot resemblances in very basic words across languages that seem unrelated: compare English mother, German Mutter, Spanish madre, Latin mater.

But Basque isn't related to any of them

Basque (euskara), spoken in parts of northern Spain and south-western France, is a language isolate: it has no proven relationship to any other living language. It was spoken in the region before the Indo-European languages arrived, and has survived alongside Spanish and French ever since.

Hungarian and Finnish are cousins of each other, not their neighbours

Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian belong to the Uralic family, not Indo-European. Hungarian is distantly related to Finnish, despite the countries being far apart, and not to German or Slovak, its neighbours.

German capitalises every noun

In German, all nouns start with a capital letter: der Hund, das Haus, die Freiheit. It's a useful reading aid: you can spot the nouns in a sentence at a glance. English and Danish once did something similar, but both dropped the practice.

There is an official guardian of French

The Académie française, founded in 1635, is the institution traditionally associated with the French language. It publishes a dictionary and makes recommendations on usage. Its recommendations aren't legally binding, and everyday French often goes its own way, but the idea of an official body for a language says something about how seriously French speakers take theirs.

Far more people speak Portuguese in Brazil than in Portugal

Brazil's population is many times larger than Portugal's, so the great majority of Portuguese speakers live in South America. The two varieties have drifted apart noticeably; Brazilian vs European Portuguese explains how.

English is a Germanic language with a French wardrobe

English is Germanic in its core: everyday words like house, drink, go and have are related to German. But after the Norman conquest of 1066, French was the language of England's ruling class for centuries, and English absorbed a huge amount of French vocabulary. That's why English often has pairs like cow (Germanic, the animal) and beef (French, the meat). It's also why English speakers find so many familiar words in French, and why French false friends exist.

Spanish has the letter ñ, and it has a history

The ñ started as a scribe's shortcut: medieval writers abbreviated a doubled nn by writing one n with a small n above it, which became the tilde. Portuguese reached a similar sound with the spelling nh (vinho), and Italian and French with gn (bagno, champagne).

Switzerland has four national languages

German, French, Italian and Romansh are all national languages of Switzerland. Romansh, a Romance language spoken by a small community in the canton of Graubünden, is a reminder that the Romance family is larger than the "big four" most learners know. More on how those big four compare in how similar are the Romance languages?

Languages keep inventing words

None of these languages is finished. German keeps building new compound words, French debates English loanwords, and Spanish and Portuguese absorb words from across the Americas. Every language you learn is a moving target, which is part of the fun.