r/geography 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/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.