48

I saw this question asked on Twitter today. At first blush it seemed like an easy reference question, but I can't find any place that actually has this spelled out in one place. I ended up having to do a lot of research, and still lots of folks came up with answers I didn't think about.

So perhaps this question can be that place. Feel free to add any qualifying languages that aren't listed to the wiki answer below.

For the purposes of the question, I'd like to stick to standard accepted boundaries of Europe, and not to include languages that only appeared due to late modern migration (eg: Arabic in Germany). Also of course no dead languages. (sorry, Etruscan. We miss you!)

Globe map of Europe

T.E.D.
  • 118,977
  • 15
  • 300
  • 471
  • 9
    I see you've already got several high quality answers here so it's too late to change anything, but this question would have been better asked on Linguistics.SE. – CJ Dennis May 22 '19 at 03:39
  • 2
    @LangLangC I don't think most definitions (perhaps not any geographic definitions) of Europe include parts of Georgia. The most modern definition uses the ridge of the Caucasus as the border, and that's the northern border of Georgia. Most older definitions placed the Europe/Asia border even farther north. The only claims I see of Georgia as being European are based on culture, which doesn't seem to me to be valid. You might as well call Canada European on that basis! – C Monsour May 22 '19 at 11:00
  • 1
    @DavidRobinson I asked in Linguistics since I find the comment and possible answers to it very interesting. – Pavel May 23 '19 at 14:21

5 Answers5

73

Overview

Wikipedia: Languages of Europe Src: Linguistic Maps Of Europe | Languages Of Europe

Since there are a fair amount of them, languages are grouped below by language family:

Basque

A linguistic isolate native to the Pyrenees mountains between Spain, and France.

Basque Map
Source: "Location of the Basque-language provinces within Spain and France" by Eddo from Wikipedia.org

Uralic Languages

Map of Uralic
Source: "Linguistic maps of the Uralic languages" by Eddo derived based on a work by Chumwa from Wikipedia.org

Afro-Asiatic Languages:

  • Maltese*, spoken on the island of Malta. Quite closely related to Arabic, this is the only Afro-Asiatic language that is an official language of an EU member country.

enter image description here

Turkic Languages

Turkic Map
Source: "An accurate representation of the areas in which Turkic languages are spoken." Copyright by Mirza Farahani, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 from wikipedia.org.

  • Turkish in the portions of the nation of Turkey west of the Bosporus (including Istanbul).

  • Azeri in the portion of Azerbaijan that is in Europe.

  • Volga Tatar in Tatarstan area of Russia

  • Crimean Tatar, spoken by Tatars in Crimea

  • Kipshak in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe

  • Bashkir language is a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch. It is co-official with Russian in the Republic of Bashkortostan, European Russia

  • Kazakh in the Russian-Kazakh border regions

  • Gagauz language by the Gagauz people of Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey, and it is the official language of the Autonomous Region of Gagauzia in Moldova.

  • Chuvash language in European Russia, primarily in the Chuvash Republic and adjacent areas.

Caucasian language families

These three language families are not considered to be related to each other, so this a geographic grouping, not a linguistic one. The below language families are all native to the region between the Black and Caspian seas.

Northeast Caucasian (Caspian) Languages

enter image description here
Source: "Approximate distribution of the branches of the Northeast Caucasian languages" by JorisvS from wikipedia.org

Spoken in both Azerbaijan and in the Russian Republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia. These include Chechen, Avar, Lezgian, Dargwa, Ingush, Lak, and Nakh.

Northwest Caucasian (Pontic) Languages

enter image description here
Source: "Approximate distribution of the branches of the Northwest Caucasian languages" by Gaga.vaa from wikipedia.org

Within Europe, spoken primarily in the Russian Republics of Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay–Cherkessia. Members of the family represented in Europe include Karbardian and Adyghe.

Kartvelian (Iberian) Languages

enter image description here

  • Georgian in European portions of Georgia*

Mongolian languages

In the form of Kalmyckian Oirat, with Kalmyckia also the region in Europe with Buddhism as the main religion.

enter image description here

Footnotes:

* - Geographically debatable

Anixx
  • 32,728
  • 13
  • 90
  • 183
T.E.D.
  • 118,977
  • 15
  • 300
  • 471
  • 6
    Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Due to collaborative nature of this answer, we encourage use of the chat link for discussion on the contents of this answer. Further comments below will most likely be deleted. – sempaiscuba May 21 '19 at 23:45
  • I think, beyond the listed families you won't find any living non-IE languages in Europe. So, either one could add new individual languages to these families or add extinct languages. – Anixx Apr 13 '23 at 14:28
  • I explicitly left extinct languages out of the question. I really love Etruscan and pals, but there are a nearly infinite amount of extinct languages. – T.E.D. Apr 13 '23 at 15:08
22

This answer is about Maltese. There have been various comments, which I build on and add to, as there are several complications:

  1. Does it result from a "modern migration"?
  2. Is Malta in Europe?
  3. Is it an Indo-European language?

Let us look at each of these. The main reference is Maltese language.

1. Does it result from a "modern migration"? Now that the question has been clarified with a link to a definition of modern, the answer is clearly no. So it is eligible.

2. Is Malta in Europe? It is an island between Europe and Africa, so, logically, it is neither European nor African. You could say it is European, based on proximity, but as T.E.D. quotes. "Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass...there are some exceptions based on sociopolitical and cultural differences... Malta was considered an island of Northwest Africa for centuries" so there are arguments on both sides. As for the argument about whether it is culturally European, there are two complications here. One is that it is not homogeneous. The northern part (nearer Sicily) is more Italianate (even with quite a lot of bilingualism) compared to the south. The other problem is that not all of its European-ness results from its proximity to Italy (which would help to class it as European) but rather from the fact that the UK treated it as a colony for quite a long time. We do not generally count places as part of Europe just because the UK injected culture from afar. As far as religion is concerned, Catholicism does not make a place European. The Maltese do seem to treat themselves as entirely European (in my limited experience) and they are in the EU, so I would put them in Europe on balance.

3. Is it an Indo-European language? The above reference says it is a Semitic language, but the fact is that it is a creole, with Sicilian Italian as the acrolect and Sicilian Arabic as the basolect. Whether you classify a creole according to the acrolect or the basolect is more to do with politics than linguistics, since the linguistic fact is that it is a mixture. As recently as the 1990s Maltese children were being taught in schools, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, and on the flimsiest of evidence, that Maltese was based on Italian. Every creole is different in terms of how much of the acrolect and basolect there is in it, but there is typically a higher proportion of the basolect in the grammar and basic vocabulary than there is in the advanced vocabulary. In the case of Maltese the above reference says

The original Semitic base, Siculo-Arabic, comprises around one-third of the Maltese vocabulary, especially words that denote basic ideas and the function words, but about half of the vocabulary is derived from standard Italian and Sicilian; and English words make up between 6% and 20% of the vocabulary. A recent study shows that, in terms of basic everyday language, speakers of Maltese are able to understand less than a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic, which is related to Siculo-Arabic, whereas speakers of Tunisian are able to understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese.

That looks to me like a substantially Indo-European language, but also like a substantially non-Indo-European language. Since the question is about non-Indo-European influence in Europe, which does occur in Maltese, I think Maltese should be included, for the Semitic half.

So, on balance, I think Maltese should be included, as it contains a significant amount of Semitic in somewhere that is substantially European.

David Robinson
  • 685
  • 3
  • 8
  • 1
    Cypriot Arabic is more clearly a Semitic language (not being a creole, just a dialect of Arabic), although whether to count Cyprus as being in Europe is probably more debatable than with Malta. – C Monsour May 22 '19 at 01:15
  • 6
    Cyprus being in Europe is not remotely debatable, despite it's location – at the least the larger Greek part. Culturally it is Greek (thus European), linguistically it is Greek, and ethnically many Greek Cypriots (and some Turkish Cypriots) still share a lot with other Greeks. Oh yeah, and did I mention it's a member state of the EU?

    Anyway, Malta is very much debatable, though @David Robinson addressed this point among others, and made a decent argument.

     – Noldorin May 22 '19 at 01:20
  • 8
    @Noldorin Continents are determined by geography, not by culture. You really weaken your case when you say that at least part of Cyprus is in Europe. Either the whole island is in Europe or none of it is. The cultural argument clearly holds no water, for consider that the coast of Asia Minor was historically Greek. And do you know what the Greeks called it? "Asia". – C Monsour May 22 '19 at 01:52
  • 6
    Malta is an island on the European continental shelf, it is geographically in Europe. @Noldorin Cyprus is clearly in Asia, geographically speaking. Culturally, it is European, however. – Chieron May 22 '19 at 06:28
  • 2
    @LangLangC it is counted as Germanic, it seems to mostly have Hebrew (semitic) loanwords (many of which found its way into German, too), but the grammar is Germanic – Chieron May 22 '19 at 06:29
  • 2
    Its WP page pretty firmly places the Maltese language as Semitic, and it isn't listed on any of their lists of creoles. Where's this answer's reference that someone credible agues otherwise? It did say that a hair over half its vocabulary has Romance (IE) roots, but there's far more to a language than just its vocabularly (just like there's far more to a computer programming language than just its reserved words and symbols). – T.E.D. May 22 '19 at 14:17
9

I think Kalmyk has not been mentioned yet. And depending on what you define as "late modern", Chinese (e.g. in Liverpool) may also count.

Steve Bird
  • 19,763
  • 11
  • 93
  • 99
Jan
  • 9,097
  • 2
  • 22
  • 50
  • 1
    The Late Modern period in historical circles is generally taken to start in the mid 18th Century. This was picked specifically to avoid the innumerable little urban ethnic diaspora enclaves all over the world enabled by modern transportation (and to give transient minority populations time to assimilate if that's their inclination). – T.E.D. May 22 '19 at 14:24
  • 3
    Chinese definitely doesn't count. I think the OP makes it clear that we're only talking of languages that have some reasonable claim to being "native" or "long-established" in Europe. – Noldorin May 22 '19 at 16:11
  • 2
    And yet Kazakh is supposed to count, because some areas west of the Ural river have been part of a Kazakh nation-state for an eternity of around 27.5 years (if I have calculated correctly). – Jan May 22 '19 at 19:05
  • 1
    I agree, Kazakh probably shouldn't count either... – Noldorin May 22 '19 at 20:18
  • 6
    There have been Kazakh native speakers in the area West of the Ural River for centuries, yes? So of course Kazakh should be on the list. If long-standing political independence were a requirement, you couldn't even count Basque. – C Monsour May 23 '19 at 11:56
  • Thank you for pointing that out. I guess I stand corrected. Yet according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukey_Horde), it seems that a permanent Kazakh presence west of the Ural river begins only around the end of the 18th century, which is not that much earlier than Chinese presence in England (though maybe the difference grows a bit if you only count populations with women and children) – Jan May 23 '19 at 12:36
3

According to Dr. Seth Lerer, of The Great Courses and University of California San Diego, the Georgian language 's parentage is unknown, so it may not be Indo-European.

Mike
  • 31
  • 1
  • Do you have any citations that Georgian might be Indo-European? The only proposed connection between the Kartvelian languages and IE that I am aware of is Nostratic. – chepner May 23 '19 at 20:19
  • I don't. The closest I can come to that is very anecdotal. I have discussed this with a Russian girl whose mother is from Georgia. She thinks it must be Indo-European based on the fact that, while speaking in the Georgian language, they (the Georgian people) use a lot of Russian words. This, of course, does not constitute any amount of scientific rigor. Given the close proximity of Georgia and Russia and Russia's overlordship of Georgia over the last century, it's not surprising that plenty of Russian words have mixed into the Georgian vernacular. That's all I've got concerning your question. – Mike May 29 '19 at 18:44
  • Yeah, there's no "might" about it; Georgian is flat out not an IE language. I highly suspect that is what those words from Dr. Lerer were trying to tell you. – T.E.D. Feb 25 '20 at 13:44
  • The "Basque" lanuage (spoken at the northern border between Spain and France) is also of an unknown origin and not IE. – Mike Mar 02 '20 at 15:06
0

This answer is about Yiddish. There have been various comments, which I build on and add to, as there are several complications:

  1. Does it result from a "modern migration"?
  2. Is Yiddish spoken in Europe?
  3. Is it an Indo-European language?

Let us look at each of these.

1. Does it result from a "modern migration"? Now that the question has been clarified with a link to a definition of modern, the answer is clearly no. So it is eligible.

2. Is Yiddish spoken in Europe? Yes, it has been for centuries, although it is rapidly dying out. So it should be counted as a European language

3. Is it an Indo-European language? The quick answer, according to most sources on the internet, is that it a Germanic language (thus IE) with Hebrew (thus Semitic) added.

But I don't think it is fair to classify any language as IE or non-IE based solely on a simple majority. If there are significant elements from both IE and non-IE, then it is linguistically important as both an IE and a non-IE language, in my view. If we were to go with a simple majority view then perhaps the UK should be excluded from Europe based on the fact that 52% of the population does not want it included in Europe.

When we get to the question of how much Hebrew there is in Yiddish, and thus whether Yiddish makes a significant contribution to non-IE European language, I came across a problem. No easy-to-find online source in English told me. This reflects the low status of Yiddish in the English-speaking world in the 21st century.

I turned to French Wikipedia which stated that the vocabulary is 10-15% Semitic. I would say that this figure, by itself, means that Yiddish should be included, as it means there is a Semitic element in European language, even if it is not large.

But there is a much more important consideration: whereas Maltese has had no significant effect on any other European language that I can find (notwithstanding this list of words I have never heard of), Yiddish has been the conduit for a number of Semitic words to enter not only German and Polish, but also English (paying attention to those marked as Hebrew in origin) (many of which I have heard of) and French.

So, given that Yiddish is the European language which has introduced many (and possibly the most) Semitic words into English, German, Polish and French, I think it deserves a place on the list, regardless of its predominantly IE grammar and the particular percentage of words of Semitic origin.

David Robinson
  • 685
  • 3
  • 8
  • 4
    Do you have a credible source to reference this claim that Yiddish is not Indo-European? This website is meant to be descriptive, not proscriptive. If you have a novel idea about how historical things are to be viewed or classified that goes completely against the current scholarly consensus, we'd ask that you first submit it to the appropriate journals and get it published (peer-reviewed, etc.). – T.E.D. May 22 '19 at 18:12
  • I am sorry, @LangLangC but I do not know enough about Yiddish or Hebrew to answer that. Ivrit was developed by speakers of various European languages using their knowledge of ancient Hebrew, so it is presumably quite complicated to analyse, even if it is (I have heard) a relatively simple language to learn. I must defer to experts. – David Robinson May 22 '19 at 18:30
  • @T.E.D. I am trying to be descriptive by basing my answer on what I know about the language. I consider it proscriptive to create an arbitrary system for classifying languages that makes a judgment about which aspect of the language (e.g. grammar or lexicon) should be used for putting a language in one (and only one) box. – David Robinson May 22 '19 at 18:35
  • 4
    Every detailed tree of Indo-European languages I've seen places Yiddish squarely in the Germanic branch. – Gort the Robot May 22 '19 at 19:47
  • That is an interesting point, @LangLangC, that adds weight to my argument that a rigid classification is undesirable. There is clearly no suggestion that a language suddenly jumps from one group to another. Rather, it is on the slide, a concept which is incompatible with a rigid classification. We classify words according to etymology, so תְּכֵלֶת, tekhelet, which is a dye in ancient Hebrew, is classified as Semitic. However, in modern Hebrew, it has take on the meaning of European blue, etc. and has become a colour. – David Robinson May 22 '19 at 19:51
  • Thus the word is Semitic in form, but the meaning has slid into Indo-European. A similar thing has happened in Welsh, where cynics say it is moving from Celtic to English-family, as glas (originally "bluey greeny darkish grey") has become "blue" (as understood in English) and is this a direct translation for תְּכֵלֶת in Modern Hebrew. – David Robinson May 22 '19 at 19:57
  • I am of course not a professional linguist, but I at least think that the structure of the language (grammar, tenses, etc.) is a lot more important than the lexicon. And looking at the wikipedia page on Yiddish grammar it's hard to argue that it is anything but a Germanic language. A few (or many) borrowings do not make a language change its family – Denis Nardin May 22 '19 at 20:33
  • 3
    I mean, around 60% of English words are of Latin origin, but no one in their right mind would argue that English is a Romance language. – Denis Nardin May 22 '19 at 20:40
  • By the way, linguistics texts often include Yiddish cognates when discussing Germanic languages, so it seems hard to believe linguists would consider Yiddish not to be Indo-European. Sure, it has a lot of Semitic loan words. English has a lot of French, Norse, Latin, and Greek loan words, but it's still a West Germanic language, just like Yiddish. – C Monsour May 23 '19 at 11:57
  • @CMonsour What I am objecting to is the idea that Yiddish has to be put in one box and to be locked in there all the time. Your example is useful because it illustrates how you really have to treat Yiddish as a Germanic language when citing a Yiddish cognate of a German word, as it does not make sense to say "here is a cognate in a Semitic language of this German word". But the flip-side of this is that if you cite a Yiddish cognate of a Hebrew word, then it only really makes sense if you classify Yiddish as a Semitic langua – David Robinson May 23 '19 at 12:02
  • @Denis Nardin No, it's not about grammar. It's about regular sound correspondences that show evolution of speech from a common ancestor and are distinguishable from borrowings. If it were about the structure and grammar of the language, one would never conclude that Latin, with all its nouns cases and simple tenses and ways of avoiding prepositions and indifference to word order, was related to French, with no noun cases, a tendency to compound verb forms, strict word order, and prepositions by the barrel. – C Monsour May 23 '19 at 12:05
  • @David Robinson But a loan word is not a cognate. Are there lautgesetzen relating Hebrew and Yiddish words to a common ancestor? Or is there just borrowing followed by Germanic sound changes that may allow you to tell when the item was borrowed, but that don't demonstrate an evolutionary relationship? – C Monsour May 23 '19 at 12:50
  • 1
    In other words, No you won't do that? OK... – T.E.D. May 23 '19 at 13:03
  • The problem is, @CMonsour, that this argument is entirely circular. If it is a Germanic language then it follows that any Semitic words are borrowings. But if it is Semitic then it follows that these words are inherited. No one is saying it is purely Semitic but if we treat it as a mixture then both its Semitic words and its Germanic ones are inherited. This is the reason that Norman words in English are not normally treated as borrowings. – David Robinson May 23 '19 at 13:51
  • 4
    @David Robinson Please cite a text that treats Norman words in English as not being loan words. – C Monsour May 23 '19 at 16:15
  • 4
    A point no one has mentioned: the Semitic words in Yiddish are, to a large extent, related to Jewish rituals and practices. (An example - I don't recall the source; might have been one of Max Weinreich's books - is how Yiddish uses a Germanic-derived word (zun) for the sun, but a Hebrew-derived one (levone) for the moon, because the moon figures much more in Jewish practice - there is a monthly ceremony of blessing G-d for creating and renewing it.) Which makes Yiddish more in the nature of a jargon, not unlike "medicalese," for example, which no one would consider a separate language. – Meir May 24 '19 at 04:23
  • 1
    @Meir I think you mean it makes the Semitic words in Yiddish (not the entire language) in the nature of a jargon. This seems very similar to the cases of Latin legal terms or French heraldic terms borrowed into English. – C Monsour May 24 '19 at 16:11
  • Yiddish belongs to High German languages of Elbe Germanic of West Germanic. It evolved from Middle High German. It hes less non-Germanic words than English. – Anixx Apr 13 '23 at 14:12