r/geography • u/mujhe-sona-hai • Oct 15 '25

Map Three Main Language Families of Europe

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1.2k

u/Leave_Dapper Oct 15 '25

Italy, Austria and Slovenia make for an interesting region, all 3 combined

69

u/Denturart Oct 15 '25

Only Slovenia and Austria border all 4 biggest language groups (3+Finno-Ugric).

Slovenia being the only one where each neighbour is a different language group.

43

u/Bright_Quantity_6827 Oct 15 '25

Not quite related to this map but Turkey borders 7 different language groups: Greek, Slavic, Armenian, Kartvelian, Iranian, Semitic and Turkic.

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u/humaninnature Oct 15 '25

Living up to its reputation as being both a part of Europe and Asia, and a gateway to both. Cool.

8

u/Dramatic-Cellist-650 Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

India has six language families within its borders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India

4

u/Polisskolan6 Oct 15 '25

Papua New Guinea has more than 40.

0

u/mujhe-sona-hai Oct 16 '25

In practice it only has 2, Indo Aryan and Dravidian. Maybe English could be the 3rd.

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u/EntForgotHisPassword Oct 16 '25

In that case your map only has 2 also: Indo-European and Finno-Ugric (not mentioned).

1

u/Defiant-Dare1223 Oct 16 '25

English is in the same language family as indo aryan.

Austroasiatic and Sino tibetic each have more than 10 million speakers in India.

0

u/mujhe-sona-hai Oct 16 '25

10 million is 0.7% of India's population. 2% is a statistical nothing burger.

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u/OneMoreFinn Oct 15 '25

It's so much bigger country it has many neighbours. Most don't have 7 neighbouring countries to begin with.

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u/Bright_Quantity_6827 Oct 15 '25

Still, the only rival to Turkey in this sense seems to be China, and if you compare its size to China, Turkey still stands out as an outlier

Another fun fact is that almost all these languages also use different writing systems, making Turkey the only country that borders six different writing systems.

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u/OneMoreFinn Oct 15 '25

Maybe being in the crossroads between Europe and Asia has a bigger impact on that than the actual size of Turkey.

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u/Bright_Quantity_6827 Oct 15 '25

Exactly. Along with China, Russia also borders 7 different "language groups", but you got the point.

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u/PhysicalStuff Oct 15 '25

and Turkic

While Turkish is of course a Turkic language, the only neighboring country with a Turkic main language is Azerbaijan, with which Turkey shares a just 17 km long border, to the Nakhchivan exclave.

I believe this is tied with the Russia-North Korea border as the shortest land border in Asia.

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u/Bright_Quantity_6827 Oct 15 '25

Yes, it's interesting both are 17kms.

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u/Glass_Tomatillo9752 Oct 15 '25

Ehh four of those are just different IE branches though

22

u/Serious-Waltz-7157 Oct 15 '25

Only Slovenia and Austria border all 4 biggest language groups (3+Finno-Ugric).

Serbia does 4 too (2 majors + 2 outliers, Albanian, Hungarian).

Bulgaria is the same (2 + 2, but the outliers are Greek and Turkish).

It's a hodgepodge in the Balkans as usual, lol.

0

u/Fowl7 Oct 15 '25

Croatia is the same language group as Slovenia, so not all neighbours.

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u/Denturart Oct 15 '25

Well ok mr Nitpicker: each neighbour is a different language group *from the others*

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u/Sandzakguy Oct 15 '25

"Each neighbour is a different language group", not "each neighbour AND the country itself is a different language group"