Europe is very diverse in terms of languages, with many different tongues and dialects. Sometimes it’s hard to know where a language ends and a dialect begins. For example, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian speakers can understand each other better than English and Scots speakers can understand each other, but the first three are separate languages while Scots is mostly considered a weird dialect of English. And then there’s German, Pennsylvania Dutch (which is also German), Low German, and Swiss German. We’ll hold off on that for a bit.
The main language families of Europe are Germanic, Romance, and Celtic. An exception is Basque, a language isolate, or a language that is unrelated to other surviving languages. Basque is spoken in northern Spain and southern France. Minor language families include the Uralic family, which is represented by Finnish, Sami, Estonian, and Hungarian.
Romance languages include Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, Corsican, Aragonese, Occitan, Romanian, Romansh, and Aromanian. And no, the Romance languages are not called that because French is the ‘language of love.’ It actually has to do with Romans. See, Latin is the ancestor of all of these languages, and Latin was spread around Europe by the Romans. Therefore, people began to call the various dialects of Latin Romance because it was a Roman language. Has absolutely nothing to do with love. Much of English vocabulary comes from Romance languages, so these are easy to learn.
Germanic languages include, well, obviously, German, Dutch, English, Frisian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Luxembourgish, Flemish, Walloon, Swiss German, Pennsylvania Dutch, and Low German, to name a few. Germanic languages are all closely related and are very similar except for English, which has a lot of Romance influence. However, once you know what to look out for, these languages are very easy to learn.
Anay Ganesh 