Sunday 29 May 2016

native language = official language?


Is always the regional native language of the people the same than the official national language of a country?
Of course it is not!
Lot of minority language are present in almost all the countries and a lot of people has to learn the official language of the country in school or with the television, because another language is spoken in the streets.
Europe is not an exception. In Europe there are a lot of minority languages. just take a look in a common language map of Europe in the net.
Personally I like a lot the maps of the language site muturzikin, they are very accurate and precise.
So, I just took a map from this site and I highlighted the areas in which the official language of the country is also the original native language of the region.


as you can see there are a lot of grey areas, that means that lot of people use the national language of their own country as their second language.
(in the map the priority was given to the regional language. the gray areas don't mean that nobody there speak the official language of the country, but it means in those regions the official language was imported and it is somehow co-existing with the regional unofficial language).

2 comments:

  1. The map is nothing less than impressive. However, the interpretation is somewhat harder, what defines a language? For instance, Scandinavia and German form language continuums, where clear-cutting language boundaries is really hard. Hence, the question to be asked should rather be not if the talk the language of the captial, but how different they talk compared to the capital.

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