European Cultures and Languages

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European Cultures and Languages
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• The people of Europe are all considered European
  though their national cultures are all different
• Europe is a continent of diverse languages
• Often people from one country can understand the
  language of people from another country
  Why?
• Many people of Europe are bilingual
• The languages of Europe belong to the
• Indo- European Language Family

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Indo-European Languages3 Branches

• Germanic German and English
• English is spoken in more parts of the world
  than any other language
• Spoken in northwest and central Europe
• Uses the Roman Alphabet
• Romance French and Italian
• Based on Latin, the language of the ancient
  Romans
• Spoken in the southern and western Europe
• Uses the Roman Alphabet
• Slavic Russian
• Russian is an example of a Slavic Language
• Uses the Cyrillic Alphabet
• Spoken in central and eastern Europe

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Roman AlphabetGermanic and Romance Language
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Cyrillic AlphabetSlavic Language
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European Languages
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Why would having so many languages be a problem?

• Difficult to live, work, and trade with people
  who could not communicate with each other

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What are Europeans doing to help solve the
language problems?

• Europeans are trying to solve the problem by
  having school children learn one or more
  languages beside their own
• The European Union has made 23 official
  languages so people will be able to understand
  the laws and decisions made by the government
• There are special laws to protect languages, too!
  
• Europeans want to keep alive the languages spoken
  only by a few people and at the same time to
  build a united Europe