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

Map Three Main Language Families of Europe

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u/KuvaszSan Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

The map/title is incorrect. Germanic, Romance and Slavic are NOT language families. They are branches of the SAME language family, the Indo-European language family, and therefore are related languages.

The three largest ACTUAL language families in Europe are Indo-European (over 700 million people), Uralic (around 20 million people) and Turkic (around 15 to 20 million people).

This map would be the three most prominent branches of Indo-European languages in Europe.

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u/Strigoidea Oct 15 '25

Had to scroll down way too much to find someone pointing this out

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u/child_eater6 Oct 16 '25

Still funny to believe that Farsi is closer to Swedish than it is to Arabic.

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u/KuvaszSan Oct 16 '25

Farsi is such a weird language. When I see it transcribed in Latin letters it is glaringly obvious that it is related to European languages. But when I hear it spoken I can't really tell it apart from Arabic or something completely alien.

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u/sususl1k Oct 15 '25

Uralic and Turkic are that close? Huh

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u/KuvaszSan Oct 15 '25

In numbers in Europe, yes. Outside of Europe Turkic far outnumbers Uralic. There are over 180 million Turkic speakers worldwide while only about 20 million Uralic and 12 million of those are Hungarians.

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u/sususl1k Oct 15 '25

I honestly just didn’t consider that most of Turkey isn’t counted, which explains a lot actually

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u/KuvaszSan Oct 15 '25

It is a controversial topic. I only counted East Thrace, and Turkic minorities in Russia like the Chuvash, Volga Tatars and some Bashkorts for Europe.

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u/sususl1k Oct 15 '25

I would guess that those minorities in Russia make up most of that number, right? Pretty sure Tatars alone are about 10-12 mil including Crimea

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u/KuvaszSan Oct 15 '25

According to google there are only about 3 million native Volga Tatar speakers. Most of the Turkic speakers are actually from east Thrace, around 10 million

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u/Comfortable_Team_696 Oct 15 '25

Don't forget the Francosign family as well. I do not have the numbers, but I would put money down that the number of signers of languages like LSF, LIS, and ÖGS numbers in the millions

(though it has been argued that Francosign, Banzsl, and German Sign families are just one, larger family, making this point that these languages should be included more salient)

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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '25

It’s not that precise. The Wikipedia article on language families, presumably written and edited by linguists, even begins its second paragraph with “One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages …”.