Describe the major language families present in Europe. How do groups within these families use language to differentiate themselves culturally?
What will be an ideal response?
Language is an important source of nationalism in Europe, but most Europeans speak more than one language. Germanic languages dominate the region, with German spoken by the most people and English a close second. Dutch and Flemish and Scandinavian languages are also part of the Germanic language family. The southern portion of the continent is dominated by Romance languages which evolved from common Latin, spoken during the Roman Empire. Italian has the most speakers of this language family–spoken not only in Italy but parts of Switzerland and on the French island of Corsica. French is also spoken beyond the political boundaries of France–in Switzerland and southern Belgium. Spanish is also an important part of the Romance language family in Europe, but has many distinctive regional variations. These variations are associated with unique cultural groups–Castilian Spanish, and Catalan. This idea of cultural difference has even led to Catalonia being given autonomous status within Spain. Portuguese and Romanian are the other two important Romance languages, however, Romanian borrows many words from neighboring Slavic languages. Slavic languages are distinctly divided based on the alphabet used to write them. Polish, Slovakian, and Czech are written using the Latin alphabet while southern Slavic languages such as Serbian and Bulgarian are written using the Cyrillic alphabet.
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