Minority European Languages

In this train wreck of a thread, the OP mentions “oppressed” people of the earth. He/she included Bretons and Basques, which are both European peoples.

Disregarding the issue of the oppression of those peoples, how many people in Europe speak “minority”* languages, such as Basque or Catalan, and how many such languages are there?

The ones that come to mind are Basque, Catalan, Breton and Ladino. Surely there must be others.

By “minority” languages I mean: not the official or dominant language of the country in which the speaker lives.

How many people? No idea. But I’ll list minority languages in Spain, just as a starter. There’s Galego, Astur-Leonese, Aragonese, Basque, Catalan (and Valencian and Balear, which are dialects of it), Caló, more if you’re inclined to split them up (Ehtremeño, for instance, is really a dialect of Astur-Leonese; A Fala de Xálima is basically a dialect of Galego.)

I couldn’t begin to list the ones in France or Italy, let alone in non-Romance areas. Some of these languages are actively repressed by governments, while some aren’t. But the linguistic situation of Europe is complicated and most regions have a huge variety of native languages. In a lot of cases, they’re treated as degenerate dialects of a national language, even though they aren’t, and their speakers are treated as ignorant and have no access to education in their native language, nor any government protection of it.

Telling a Valencian his is a dialect of Catalan are fighting words I believe.

According to my Lonely Planet guide to Valencia, the Valencian right tends to insist that Valenciano is a language in its own right while the Valencian left is generally happy to consider it a dialect. I have no evidence to back up this statement however.

Back to the OP, I suppose Irish doesn’t count as a minority language since it’s an official language of Ireland, but it certainly is spoken only by a minority. In the North of Ireland it would definitely be a minority language. I’m not sure what kind of official status Welsh and Scottish Gaelic (and Scots if you consider that a separate language) have in the UK either.

Show you which crowd I hang out with.

Denmark has Faeroese and Greenlandic, together spoken by around 100.000 people. And German spoken by a smattering in the south.

There’s a few in Britain - Gallic, welsh, Manx and some people in N Ireland speak Gaelic. There was also Cornish but it died out (but a few nutters are trying to revive it)

Gallic is widely spoken in the Highlands and islands of Scotland - welsh is pretty widespread in regions of wales. No one really speaks Manx.

I wouldn’t want to play scrabble in welsh.

In all those areas english is also spoken, but is not the first choice of a lot of people.

About 1% of Swiss supposedly speak Romansch. And what is that odd language they speak in Glasgow? How about Newcastle?

I don’t know…I think you could get a hell of a triple word score out of “gwrywgydiwr”.

Whether you could pronounce it or not is another question.

Stranger

English. As it should be spoken.

Feh. The Navajo code-talkers have nothing on your lot.

Scots Gaelic is only pronounced “Gallic”, it is spelt Gaelic.

Otherwise it would be French.

Manx is also technically a dead language - that is, there’s no native speakers left. (I’ve got a book somewhere with details of the last native Manx speaker, which I might bother to dig out :wink: )

IIRC, there’s about 1.5 million Welsh speakers, although only a small proportion of these speak it as their first language. All official government publications, websites, etc. are published in Welsh, or at least have some Welsh available (even the Ministry of Defence)

Russia has a whole slew, including Mordva ( Finnic ), Mari ( Finnic ), Chuvash ( Turkic ), Bashkir ( Turkic ) and Tatar ( Turkic ), just to name a few.

Kashubian in Poland and Germany, a dieing Slavic language/dialect ( a related dialect disappeared by the 1940’s ). Sorbian or Wendish in Germany, similarly ( though I believe it has protected status there ).

  • Tamerlane

The Wikipedia’s listings of Romance languages, Germanic languages, Celtic languages, Baltic languages, and Slavic languages should give you more obscure European languages than you can shake a stick at… and that only covers the Indo-European ones.

The “minority” languages in the UK and Ireland are well served in the broadcast media. There is the Welsh language TV channel S4C, and separate radio stations for Welsh , Scots and Irish Gaelic in their respective countries.

There are a wide range of actual languages (by the separate origin/lack of mutual intelligibility standard) spoken by ethnic minorities in most European countries.

People have already picked up on some of the classics.

For France, in addition to Breton and a number of Basque dialects, there are a small but significant number of Flemish speakers, the remaining speakers of Occitan (most of whom are fluent in langue-d’oil French as well), and some Savoyards who speak what’s considered a separate language from either French or Occitan. As of the older references I have, there were a lot of Alsatian speakers of a Hochdeutsch dialect as well; whether this remains true, I’d have to defer to someone familiar with the area.

Belgium, in addition to being split between Flemish and Walloon French, also has about a 2% German-speaking minority (concentrated in the Eupen/Malmedy area).

Germany, with still a fair number of bilingual Plattdeutsch speakers, also has an ethnic minority in Saxony (former southern East Germany) of Slavic speakers of Sorbian or Wendish (both names valid; which is preferred, I don’t know.)

Switzerland is largely Schwyzerdeutsch German speaking, with a large French-speaking minority in the west, a smaller Italian minority in Ticino and Graubunden cantons, and of course the Rhaetian speakers of Romansh in Graubunden.

Poland has several German-speaking enclaves in the territories taken over from Germany after World War II, and in addition a couple of smaller West Slavic languages (Kashubian comes to mind) that are being assimilated into Polish.

Latvia and Estonia split between them the few surviving speakers of Livonian, who live approximately on the border between the two countries.

Look at a map of Russia before the Soviet Union split up for ethnic minorities; there are quite literally dozens.

Bulgaria has speakers of Turkish and a Turkic language called Gagauz.

Austria has a few small enclaves of Ladin speakers (distinguish this from Ladino, the Spanish equivalent of Yiddish; it’s a Rhaetian dialect akin to Romansh. I believe there are also a few areas on each side of the Austrian/Slovenian border where the language of one side is spoken across the border on the other.

Italy has a wide number of dialects of Italian, and in addition the following: (a) Sard, the quite distinct language of Sardinia; (b) Catalan, spoken in a couple of cities on Sardinia; © Valdostano, which is effectively a dialect of Savoyard spoken in the Valle d’Aosta; (d) Friulian, yet another Rhaetian dialect, spoken in Friuli-Venezia Giulia; (e) Albanian, spoken along the ‘heel of the boot’ in several enclaves. There may be more, but those are the ones I’m certain of.

Romania has large enclaves of German and Magyar speakers.

Sami, the language of the Lapps, is spoken in a wide band occupying parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia (Kola Peninsula).

About 10% of Finnish nationals speak Swedish, largely bilingually with Suomi. Karjala or Karelian, considered by some a separate language from Suomi Finnish, is spoken in a fairly wide belt spanning the Finnish-Russian border.

That’s a not-particularly complete list to add to what’s already been mentioned.

I don’t know how you define dead here, but I am told there are many who still speak it well. It’s on all the road signs, and there are children’s books that teach Manx. (and more adult ones too)

A dead language is one with no native or mother-tongue speakers left. There’s millions of people who speak fluent Latin, and there’s Latin translations of Harry Potter, but it’s still a dead language, linguistically.

(Ned Maddrell, d. 1974, was the last such Manx speaker.)

In Ireland (and parts of Northern Ireland) there’s TG4, a predominantly Irish language television channel. It also shows classic westerns, non-english cinema and some imported HBO shows.

As for Irish speakers in Northern Ireland I doubt many of them are native speakers of Irish, most of them having learned Irish in primary or secondary schools. I don’t know if that matters to the OP but I just thought I’d point that out.

In Ireland as well we have the minority Traveller language, Cant. Ethnologue is a great site for finding info on minority languages

You covered most of it. However :

-AFAIK, there are extremely few flemish speakers left

-Not most, but all occitan speakers speak french as well, nowadays

-The language of the Savoyards is the Franco-Provencal (not to be mistaken for Provencal, which is an occitan dialect. AFAIK, it’s spoken in Switzerland as well)

-Alsatian, contrarily to most other minority languages in France, is still quite commonly spoken. You’ll hear it even in cities.

-Catalan is spoken in a small area in southern France

-The “oil” dialects spoken in northern France (French was originally one of these dialects, and so was the Normand language imported in England) have essentially dissapeared, even old people in the countryside don’t speak them anymore. They were too close to french hence were rather perceived as “improper french”. Some can be learnt in school, thought, but extremely few pupils study them.

-Fortunately, there isn’t any Corsican on this board, or else he would have declared a vendetta on you for forgetting his language. It’s quite widely known in Corsica.
It seems it’s an opportunity to use my signature…