Languages of Europe

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There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family.^[1][2] Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. The three largest phyla of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each, and together account for close to 90% of Europeans.

Smaller phyla of Indo-European found in Europe include Hellenic (Greek, c. 13 million), Baltic (c. 7 million), Albanian (c. 5 million), Celtic (c. 4 million), and Armenian (c. 4 million). Indo-Aryan, though a large subfamily of Indo-European, has a relatively small number of languages in Europe, and a small number of speakers (Romani, c. 1.5 million). However, a number of Indo-Aryan languages not native to Europe are spoken in Europe today.^[2]

Of the approximately 45 million Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, most speak languages within either the Uralic or Turkic families. Still smaller groups — such as Basque (language isolate), Semitic languages (Maltese, c. 0.5 million), and various languages of the Caucasus — account for less than 1% of the European population among them. Immigration has added sizeable communities of speakers of African and Asian languages, amounting to about 4% of the population,^[3] with Arabic being the most widely spoken of them.

Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, English, French, Italian, and German. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe,^[4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe.)