The history of the European continent has defined countries that we recognize as having regional languages as well as official languages. Because of that, several countries are multilingual and it is quite common to learn several languages at once and use them on a daily basis.
Within minority languages, Catalan is the language with the most speakers in the European Union.
Below is a list of the main minority languages in the EU that include more than half a million speakers.
- Catalan: 7,200,000 speakers in Spain, France, Italy and Andorra.
- Galician: 2,420,000 speakers in Spain.
- Occitan: 2,100,000 speakers in Spain, France and Italy.
- Sardinian: 1,300,000 speakers in Italy.
- Irish: 1,240,000 speakers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
- Basque: 683,000 speakers in Spain and France.
- Welsh: 508,000 speakers in the United Kingdom.
Source: IDESCAT. EUROMOSAIC Study.
Tags: language, minority languages, multilingual, official languages, regional languages
I beleive that the attempted dominance of English, as a world language, is contributing to the extinction of minority languages.
A non-national, neutral, language could eliminate this by placing all languages on an equal footing.
There is an alternative to English as the dominant World Language, and its name is Esperanto.
Esperanto is now within the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers, include George Soros, Ulrich Brandenburg the new German Ambassador to NATO, and World Champion Chess Player, Susan Polger.
The World Esperanto Association enjoys consultative relations with both the United Nations and UNESCO.
Evidence can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
An interesting video can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU