Languages of Europe

Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. This family is divided into a number of branches, including Romance, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Celtic, Armenian, Iranian, and Hellenic (Greek). The Uralic languages, which include Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, also have a significant presence in Europe. The Turkic and Mongolic families also have several European members, while the North Caucasian and Kartvelian families are important in the southeastern extremity of geographical Europe. The Basque language of the western Pyrenees is an isolate unrelated to any other group, while Maltese, which is descended from Sicilian Arabic, is the only Semitic language in Europe with national language status.

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European language family descended from Proto-Indo-European, believed to have been spoken thousands of years ago. Indo-European languages are spoken throughout Europe.

Albanian

Albanian has two major dialects, Tosk Albanian and Gheg Albanian. It is spoken in Albania and Kosovo, where it has official status, and is also spoken in neighboring Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro.

Basque

Basque may refer to:

In geography:

In other uses:

See also

Basque Country

Basque Country may refer to:

See also

Basque dialects

Basque dialects are linguistic varieties of the Basque language which differ in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar from each other and from Standard Basque. Between six and nine Basque dialects have been historically distinguished:

In modern times, however, both Lower Navarrese and Lapurdian are considered part of a Navarrese–Lapurdian dialect, so there would be five dialects, divided into 11 subdialects and 24 minor varieties.

The boundaries of all these dialects do not coincide directly with current political or administrative boundaries. It was believed that the dialect boundaries between Bizkaian, Gipuzkoan and Upper Navarrese showed some relation to some pre-Roman tribal boundaries between the Caristii, Varduli and Vascones. However, main Basque dialectologists now deny any direct relation between those tribes and Basque dialects. It seems that these dialects were created in the Middle Ages from a previously quite unified Basque language, and the dialects diverged from each other since then as a result of the administrative and political division that happened in the Basque Country.

Standard Basque

Standard Basque (Basque: euskara batua or simply batua) is a standardised version of the Basque language, developed by the Basque Language Academy in the late 1960s, which nowadays is the most widely and commonly spoken Basque-language version throughout the Basque Country. Heavily based on the central Basque dialect, this is the version of the language commonly used in education at all levels—from elementary school to the university—, on television and radio, and in the vast majority of all written production in Basque.

It is also used in common parlance by new speakers that have not learnt any local dialect, especially in the cities, whereas in the countryside, with more elderly speakers, people remain attached to the natural dialects to a higher degree, especially in informal situations; i.e. Basque traditional dialects are still used in the situations where they always were used (native Basque speakers speaking in informal situations), while batua has conquered new fields for the Basque language: the formal situations (where Basque was seldom used, apart from religion) and a lot of new speakers that otherwise would not have learned Basque.