Europe's Mosaic of Languages (Current State of Development)
The language communities in Europe consist of a total of
700 million people. These languages include autochthonous languages, such as Basque, German or Hungarian, as well as immigrant languages from other parts of the world, such as Amharic, Kurdish or Vietnamese. The numbers of speakers for the individual languages vary considerably. Top of the list in terms of number of speakers is Russian with 172 million speakers in Europe (native speakers and second language). Bottom of the list is the smallest language community of Europe, the Livonian speakers, who consist of less than ten people. These are ethnic Livonians with Latvian citizenship who have learned Livonian as a second language; the last Livonian native-speaker (Viktor Bertold, who was born in 1921) died in April 2009.
In the overview of the linguistic landscape of Europe, territorial borders must unavoidably be taken into account. For the purposes of this discussion, 44 sovereign states are included under "Europe". These include all the member states of the European Union (including the outlying island of Cyprus), as well as those states which have thus far remained outside of the EU. Three states in the Caucasus region which were non-Russian Soviet republics until 1991 and which have been sovereign states since then (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) are included among the states of Europe here.
Only the European part of the Russian Federation is included here, while the linguistic cultures of Siberia are not taken into account.
In a global comparison, Europe – with less than 150 native languages – is the continent with the least number of native languages. There are several states outside Europe which have more languages than all of Europe combined. These include, for example, Papua New Guinea (826 languages), Indonesia (701), Nigeria (427), India (418), Brazil (236), the USA (224) and China (206). The languages of Europe constitute only 2.2 per cent of the total number of languages in the world (more than 6,400). However, this percentage will rise somewhat in the future because comparatively more endangered small languages will become extinct in other regions of the world than in Europe.
Native Languages and Immigrant Languages
A unique characteristic of Europe's mosaic of languages is the relatively high number of languages which are spoken by more than a million people. 48 European languages are included in this category (31 per cent of the total of 143). Besides Russian, this category includes German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian, Greek and others. On other continents, the proportion of languages with more than one million speakers is much lower: Asia comes closest to Europe with 6.6 per cent. Around half of the languages of Europe are spoken by less than a million people (e.g. Basque, Rhaeto-Romance/Romansh, Sorbian, Sami, Mari, and Ossetic). The corresponding proportion for other macro-regions such as Asia and Africa is over 80 per cent, and in the Pacific region and America it is lower than in Europe.
The figures given for the linguistic diversity of Europe refer to the languages native to the continent, i.e. languages whose speakers have lived in Europe for centuries. The figures look very different when the numerous immigrant languages are included in the overall view. The number of immigrant languages, i.e. the languages of the "New Europeans", exceeds 250 and is thus much larger than the number of autochthonous languages in Europe. The distribution of these languages across the regions of Europe is very uneven. With regard to the native languages, the ratio of diversity increases from west to east. The majority of autochthonous European languages are spoken in eastern and southeastern Europe. This applies in particular to the Caucasus region on the periphery of European, which has more than 50 languages, most of which are autochthonous. In the case of immigrant languages, the distribution is exactly the opposite: The majority of immigrant languages are concentrated in the countries of western Europe, while the number in southeastern Europe and Russia is considerably lower.
The special contact conditions of immigrant languages (also referred to as "community languages" in English) have been researched since the 1980s for individual countries,though the phenomenon did not yet have Europe-wide relevance at that stage. However, the issue of immigrant languages became increasingly acute in the 1990s with the massive influx of asylum-seekers and economic immigrants, and today the phenomenon is changing the linguistic landscape throughout western Europe and in parts of eastern Europe. Novel contact situations have arisen between native languages and languages that have been transferred to Europe from elsewhere. Today, the languages of African immigrants are in contact with English, French and German on European soil, thereby continuing a tradition which previously only existed in colonial history. An increasing number of "linguistic oases" is emerging, which are continuously created and expanded in the European linguistic landscape by migrants from non-European countries. In the urban setting, in particular, contact between languages of old and new Europeans is becoming increasingly complex.
Europe is currently experiencing the emergence of new pidgins. In their interaction as "new Europeans" with the native Europeans, immigrants from overseas (particularly from Africa) in western Europe and from Asia in eastern Europe (particularly in Russia) have caused linguistic interferences which are increasingly resulting in pidgins of French (in the conurbations of Paris and Brussels), of English (in the British industrial cities), of German (in the urban milieu of the large cities) and of Russian (particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg). The linguistic landscape of Europe is opening into a dimension of socio-linguistic fusion, and these processes are initiating continuous change.