For those curious, the 24 official languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language.
Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are the three Uralic languages.
All the others are Indo-European, Greek being the only Hellenic one, Irish the only Celtic, the rest are Baltic, Slavic, Italic, or Germanic.
(I originally used the term Balto-Slavic, though I was unaware of some of the connotations of that term until just now. Baltic and Slavic do share a common origin, but that was a very very long time ago)
Arabic, even. An outlier, as it is AFAIK the only arabic dialect that is not written with the arabic alphabet. Also it's far removed from other arabic dialects.
Maltese isn’t an Arabic dialect. Yes, the grammar and phonology and core function words derive from Arabic, but more than half of the vocabulary comes from Italian/Sicilian-North African Arabic may borrow a few words from Italian here and there (just like English does), but not >50% of their vocabulary.
I think the family tree model of linguistic history is not very useful for English. Saying English is Germanic to the exclusion of everything else is not very useful.
The family tree model seems to assume that every language has only 1 direct ancestor. It seems to have been inspired by phylogenetic trees in biology. In phylogenetics, single-parent trees work fine because distantly related species can't breed with one other. By contrast, different languages borrow features from one another all the time. It could perhaps be useful for some languages, but not for English. I reckon.
Can’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)
It's not at all far removed from the North African dialects of arabic which is the dialect that it's derived from. Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
> Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
Not in my experience. Not at all actually. My experience with Arabic speakers is that they think they're understanding when you speak Maltese, because it sounds kind of familiar, but in actual fact they're not understanding much at all.
Which is not surprising after a thousand years of divergence.
Oh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)?
Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
>'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim
It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.
>Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
> > 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim
> It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.
It's both. The idea that Ukrainian is an uneducated farmer's dialect of Russian is a common talking point in the "Greater Russia / Russkiy Mir" narrative. Conversely, asserting the status of the Ukrainian language is a big part of Ukrainian identity in the face of an imperial invasion.
> That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact. Although you can sometimes find typological criteria to further argue that a variety is a language on its own, for example there are good grammatical reasons for not counting Swiss German as a variety of German, you will also find examples the other way around where two varieties have large lexical and grammatical differences and still count as the same language.
The strongest criteria for what counts as a language are based on language origins (as opposed to typology), and these do not generally suffice or make meaningful distinctions to varieties (~dialects). Mutual comprehensibility can be very low for speakers of the same language, which is why most research focuses on varieties or on speaker groups that are of particular sociolinguistic interest.
I don't get why you talk about "academic linguistics" as if there was a non-academic one and why you think linguistics "had to pay lip service into several ideologies." What are you talking about?
It's simple: linguistics is a politicized discipline, and there's a prevailing ideogically motivated tendency to put every language and dialect on equal footing.
>As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact.
Yes, this ideologically motivated idea after enough repetitionbecame "a fact" of the field, as if describing some objective physical law, and even non-political students will be taught and stick to the same (and anybody with a dissenting opinion will be getting an earful if not committing career suicide).
This wasn't always the case, it's more so with liberalism prevailing, especially in the latter half of the 20th century.
What relevance does that have? I'd say it's more important to acknowledge the fact that there are zero Irish speakers who don't also speak English. Including it as an official EU language is an ideological project rather than a pragmatic one.
Because there is a cause to revert the intentional damage done to Irish by the former rulers of the land. With Frisian there was no resistance to it. I think official language status helps provide resources to conservationists of various languages. And trying to conserve a language most of the speakers don't care about us a lot different than trying to conserve a language people do care about but we're forced to suppress for many years so have less ability to conserve it
Irish is an official language of Ireland (there is signage and instructions in Irish up and down the Republic) , Frisian is not an official language of the Netherlands to the best of my knowledge
Irish is certainly not a robust vigorous language but your 40,000-80,000 numbers downplay it I'd suggest. Here are some statistics from Deepseek
Category Region Number of Speakers Source & Year
Some Ability Republic of Ireland 1,873,997 (40% of population) 2022 Census
Some Ability Northern Ireland 228,600 (12.4% of population) 2021 Census
Daily Speakers Republic of Ireland 71,968 2022 Census
Daily Speakers Northern Ireland 43,557 2021 Census
Native/Fluent Global Estimate ~80,000-170,000 Various Sources
Speakers U.S. United States ~20,000+ Estimate
Nothing against Irish as a language at all - I am just pointing out far more people learn Frisian as their mother tongue.
Whereas Irish seems to be heavily promoted but for whatever reason precious few people learn it as their mother tongue, and those who do so are primarily in an area where it’s always been that way. For better or worse, people are preferring to use English at home and Irish is treated like a luxury good.
Correct. Frisia (or Fryslân) is a bilingual province. Frisian is an official language of the Netherlands. Someone called in front of a judge in the north of the Netherlands has the right to be heard in Frisian, for example.
Fun fact: villages, towns, and cities in Frisia often have names which differ in Frisian and Dutch. In those cases the signs at the place limits will have both names listed; the official one on top (which in some cases is the Dutch name (e.g., Leeuwarden/Ljouwert) and in some cases the Frisian (e.g., Gytsjerk/Giekerk)).
I really like that the intercom announcement voice in our trains (and also buses?) is bilingual.
And huh interesting, I didn't know that for some places with bilingual names, the Dutch name is official and for others the Frysian is? Who gets to decide that, the municipality?
Yep, the municipality decides on such matters. Places do still occasionally have their names changed (rarely of course, because it involves a lot of work including updating addresses), usually aligning with local use. In the case of De Westereen a name from the local dialect replaced both the Dutch and Frisian names (Zwaagwesteinde and Westerein, respectively).
In a number of cases originally Frisian names actually supplanted older Dutch names (e.g., Burgum, Grou, Eastermar, etc.), so those places have just one name in both languages (except on the Dutch language Wikipedia because of weird reasoning about allowable sources and apparently a hatred of Frisianised Dutch names).
I dunno about the situation with the languages of Italy, from a cursory glance at Wikipedia it seems a _lot_ more complicated than Frysian/Dutch in NL, so I really don't think it's anything "like saying" that.
But "official" means exactly what it means, and when I'm saying "Frysian is an official language of the Netherlands", it means that it's recognized as an official language of Netherlands, by the Dutch government. And if it was up to the provinces I dunno, but it's not. Frysian is the one that's considered one of the official languages of the Netherlands.
I also don't think comparing to Italy makes sense at all because countries are different and decide what are their official languages for very different historical reasons. For instance you can look up what Dutch government body is responsible for deciding the Frysian language is an official one in the Netherlands and why, and you will very likely find no Italian equivalent of that.
It's not really that difficult, an official language OF a country is recognized at a national level. Thus all official government communication must be issued in that language. In the Netherlands, only Dutch has that level of recognition. Same in Italy for Italian
Then there are other, regionally-rocognized language that local governments use alongside the national one (West Frysian in Friesland, German in South Tyrol, etc.), and may even enjoy a majority of speakers within those regions, but they are not "an official language OF" the wider country.
in response to: “what language is the Constitution of the Netherlands written in?”
Deepseek answers with, “The Constitution of the Netherlands is written in Dutch.
Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands and the language used for all primary government and legal documents, including the Constitution (Grondwet).
Key Context:
Official Language: Dutch is the sole official language for national governance.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands: It's worth noting that the Kingdom of the Netherlands also includes the Caribbean countries of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. While they have their own official languages (Papiamento and English), the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which governs the relationship between these countries, is also originally written in Dutch.
No Multilingual Version: Unlike some countries (e.g., Canada, Belgium, or Switzerland), the Netherlands does not have an official, legally equivalent version of its Constitution in any other language.
Therefore, the authoritative and legally binding text of the Constitution exists only in Dutch.”
Frisian may be an official regional language but you're not going to convince me that it's an official language of the Netherlands. Love that I'm getting downvotes about this.
The Constitution of Ireland is written in Irish and English and to the best of my knowledge where differences arise the Irish one takes precedence.
As a Brit I feel very at home when hearing/reading Dutch and Frisian. It’s a reminder that England and the Low Countries share a lot of close history all the way back to Anglo-Saxon times; of being fishers, traders, burghers and mercenaries moving around the North Sea chasing opportunities, spreading and augmenting languages.
“Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk”
That’s because all those languages are all essentially rooted in the languages/dialects of the Germanic tribes. It is why the Dutch get their English name from the German for German, Deutsch; and Nederland (Neder = Low) is German/Dutch for the Lowland Deutsch.
I’m sure everyone is aware that English comes from Anglish, i.e., the Angles as in the Germanic tribe.
Deutsch is derived from proto-germanic (as best we can tell) þiudiskaz, meaning “the people” i.e., the group of the different self associating tribes. It gets far more interesting in that it seems many of the strong dialects of especially southern Germany, Austria, and England have in fact retained some very old words and pronunciations that were lost in more standardized, conformed, and perverted dialects.
Not only on the language but also in gastronomy and architecture. When I see old towns in UK I usually think about Dutch towns but just without any biking infrastructure.
Dialect of Liverpool is called scouse, after a popular local dish -> lobscouse/Labskaus is very popular (love/hate really) in northern Germany as well.
> However modern standard Dutch (Nederlands, Hollands) is based upon Franconian, rather than Saxon dialects.
> Some of these [Old Saxon] speakers took part in the Germanic conquest of England in the fifth century AD. While it is not true that English and Plattdeutsch derive completely from the same source, the Old Saxon input into Anglo-Saxon was of primary importance and this linguistic group contributed greatly to the Anglo-Saxon dialects which our English forefathers spoke.
Old English and Old Norse are mutually intelligible (especially after you realize the precise correspondences like un- = o-). Gunnlaugs Saga explicitly says the English and Norse are of one tongue and features a Norse poet singing to an English king. As another example, Ohthere of Hålogaland (Norway) visited King Alfred's 9th century English court and simply spoke to them in his own language:
> Whoever preserved this story was also curious about Ohthere’s descriptions of where the Angles had lived ‘before they came into this land’ (England). Members of Alfred's court remembered that their ancestors came from mainland Europe, and they wanted to learn more about the lands which they identified as their own places of origin.
The scribe explicitly wrote things like "he said krán which we call crein" showing they were speaking in their own languages. It's even clearer if you consider our standard Old English is West Saxon from 850 and our standard Old Norse is from 1250 in Iceland (more different than the Danish variety of most Scandinavians in England). At the same time point,they would have more similarities (8th century Danish had wír before w turned to v).
Anglo-Saxons not Dutch. But the short answer is yes. The word Welsh is derived from the Old English word for foreigner.
Latin would have been spoken in towns and cities but as Roman rule collapsed it was replaced by Brittonic (ancestor of Welsh), unlike in the continent where it developed into various Latin derived Romance languages.
Dutch is funny - when I hear people speaking Dutch I almost feel like I should be able to understand it (but clearly as I've never learnt it, I can't).
The cadence and general way it sounds is much closer to English than any other language
They're children were taught in schools that ensured that they learned English but many adult immigrants never learned to speak English. Carnegie Steel used to try to avoid having too many workers with a common language as part of a strategy to make unionization more difficult. And when Norman Borlaug was growing up in
Saude, Iowa in the 1920s there were still a lot of older people around who only spoke Norweigen.
This raises an interesting question. Is there only one dialect of German in the LLM? My understanding is that the German German and Austrian German dialects are significantly different.
My German teacher always claimed that Swiss German and German German (Hochdeutsch) were so different that she needed subtitles to understand it, and she didn't understand why they weren't considered separate languages.
It depends. There is not one Swiss German but multiple subdialects. The language spoke around the Bern region very far away from German while the one from Zürich or Basel is much closer. Since there is no official written from they never really converged to a homogeneous language.
This sort of thing always makes me think of the English my grandmother from the foothills of the Appalachian mountains spoke. It vas very distinct from standard American English.
They really are very, very different. Knowledge of one helps with the other, but it's far more than just "a couple of weeks to adjust to the accent", for example.
EDIT: It's worth noting that this is mostly a spoken thing, AIUI - most formal/semi-formal writing would be in Hochdetusch rather than a local dialect.
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I'm specifically talking about colloquial Swiss German -- which is, I assume, what you mean by "the dialects" -- and not about Swiss Standard German, which is indeed very similar to German Standard German and can't be considered a different language.
Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).
> Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).
I presume they also pick up a lot of standard German in the media: there's lots of German movies, and Germany has the biggest movie dubbing industry in the world, too. There's some Swiss German media, but not nearly as much as there's on offer in standard German.
Some Chinese dialects are a lot further apart than eg English and German. They are mostly called 'Chinese dialects' rather than languages for political reasons. Gotta project that unity.
This, but with something oddly french about it, at least in the way it sounds.
As a native french speaker, no other language gives me that "why don't I understand what they say... oh, right, that's not my language!" feeling. Something with frequencies used, I suppose, but it always puzzles me.
When spoken? Almost certainly. But I think they mostly write in Hochdeutsch, especially in formal contexts, at least that I've seen (private chats/etc are a totally different matter), so I don't foresee any major issues there.
Austrian standard german is slightly different from the German variant, even when written. The differences are pretty minor, though, so it’s very possible to have a relatively long text without being able to tell which one it actually is (especially when potatoes are not referenced in it).
Well, even without any government mandates, ChatGPT is very happy to give you lots of dialects of English (and many other languages, too). Just ask for it.
Eg it does a passable impression of Singapore's Singlish.
Not a native, but from what I understand, austrian german is pretty similar to what is spoken in southern Germany, but northern germany is significantly different.
Is English a legacy official language then from the time the UK was a member (I‘m guessing Ireland nominated Irish instead of English). Aside it feels very un-EU to push this limitation, as I was under the assumption that EU was all about celebrating (European) diversity.
The history here is more complex than that… originally Irish was not an EU language because Ireland just used English… then as part of one the cycles of EU treaty renegotiation, Ireland successfully pushed for it to be made a secondary EU language… and then later successfully pushed for it to be upgraded to full status… so Ireland actually has two EU languages, their original one (English) and their newer one (Irish). Because the practical reality is everyone in Ireland is fluent in English-around 60% of Irish people can’t even speak basic Irish, and fluent Irish speakers is <10% of the population
Also, English remains one of the main working languages of the EU bureaucracy, because for many EU states (especially in Eastern Europe) it is a more popular foreign language than the other two (French and German)-when Czech diplomats need to talk to Spanish diplomats, English is the language they choose.
This idea people have here that “each country gets to nominate a language” isn’t how it actually works. The treaties just contain a list of languages, and which languages are in the list is down to diplomatic negotiations not any coherent principle.
Well I can only assume that when UK departed the EU, English wasn't removed automatically even though no country remaining in the EU nominates it as their official language of choice.
The UK was not a founding member of the EEC which preceded it, I don't know and haven't easily been able to find out, but it wouldn't be that surprising if the European Parliament already used English as a common language for policy etc.
(In fact to strengthen that probability, if it had been say French, when and why would it have switched go English? Just because the UK joined?)
Including the nasty political side-show that is Ulster Scots - literally only brought in as a chilling effect 'whataboutism' to diminish support when Irish speakers ask for language rights in Northern Ireland.
Well Scots is a real language. As much as English or any other. Whether enough people speak it especially in NI to justify it having an official status and such is another matter.
This is one of those topics where the Hacker News take is unlikely to be correct. There's a lot of strong feeling here, and an outsider would need at least three books to understand the historical context (one of which, afaict, has not been written yet: it's oral tradition only).
People closer to the issue are better-placed to gather the necessary information, but again: strong feeling. Most people find it hard to get past that. The most informed person I know is so biased that I don't at all trust their conclusions.
Part of the issue some people take with Ulster-Scots is that the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature, which English speakers can easily read and understand. It's often made up of slang terms and archaic spelling, in an attempt to be as different as possible to English. Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them.
> the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature
Does modern English read like historical English?
> Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them.
Sure, there are tonnes of issues with the "officialisation" of any language but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate strongly suggests it wasn't all just made up for political reasons, which was the point I was responding to.
>Does modern English read like historical English?
If you can read and understand text from the 18th century, then yes. We're not talking about Middle English or Old English.
>but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate
I should have put native speakers in quotes as well. What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in.
Nobody speaks the official Ulster Scots that was invented because the Irish language was getting support and political leaders on the other side of the community felt they deserved something as well. The Protestant community in NI see it as a bit of an embarrassment.
> If you can read and understand text from the 18th century, then yes.
Yes, and I can read and understand historical Ulster Scots as well, but you were making a different point about codification/drift, no? The English I would find in those historical writings is quite different from what is being taught in schools today or recommended in style guides.
> What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in.
Then by your definition I am a native speaker. So how can we square it that you're telling me native speakers feel one way while I feel another way?
> Nobody speaks the official Ulster Scots
That's the nature of any newly codified minority language.
> The Protestant community in NI see it as a bit of an embarrassment.
There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland. A Dungannon farmer, an East Belfast loyalist and a BT9 lecturer will all give you very different views despite being of protestant background.
My point regarding the "official" language is that it bears little resemblance to the dialect that largely died out in the 20th century. i.e. it's a fabrication. Contrast that with the differing dialects of Irish where the grammar is identical with some variations in pronunciation.
I'm not entertaining the notion that I have to pretend you're a native speaker when you've made clear you're only identifying as such for the purpose of making an argument.
>There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland.
Anyone who applies for a job in NI fills out a form where they are asked if they are a member of "the Protestant community", "the Roman Catholic community" or neither. You're denying the factual existence of the different communities in NI for the purpose of winning an argument on the internet.
> My point regarding the "official" language is that it bears little resemblance to the dialect that largely died out in the 20th century i.e. it's a fabrication
Could you outline the key ways in which it differs? And say why that suggests the language was later "fabricated?"
> I'm not entertaining the notion that I have to pretend you're a native speaker when you've made clear you're only identifying as such for the purpose of making an argument.
If you won't entertain the notion that I'm a native speaker could you amend your definition of "native speaker" or explain what differentiates me from the native speakers whose complaints you referenced previously? And could you let us know where we can read about their complaints?
> Anyone who applies for a job in NI fills out a form where they are asked if they are a member of "the Protestant community", "the Roman Catholic community" or neither.
Of course you understand that the "protestant community" is not an homogenous group with shared views and opinions on these things. The reason that question is on the forms is because of historical discrimination against Catholics and the need to quantify heritage issues in order to avoid such discrimination forwards.
One protestant might feel embarrassment, another might feel pride, and another might not care at all. Suggesting there's a unified view from "the protestant community' is disingenuous.
>Suggesting there's a unified view from "the protestant community' is disingenuous.
I've yet to meet a member of that community in person (now you've decided they exist) who has any interest in Ulster Scots as a language, (even people who are quite opinionated and argumentative on other NI topics). This is evident in the lack of Ulster Scots language classes. There are more Irish classes running in East Belfast than for Ulster Scots.
Outside of the political class (who are only interested in it as a means to stifle support for the Irish language) Ulster Scots advocates are exclusively found online.
It doesn't. It's just an opinion piece about the use of neologisms in certain publications. It makes the same claim about incomprehensibility for native speakers but also fails to reference the voices of any actual native speakers. Who are they? Do they really complain about this as you said?
> I've yet to meet a member of that community in person who has any interest in Ulster Scots as a language
Well? I have met them. I've met lecturers at Queens such as Ivan Herbison studying the thing, I've met artists like Willie Drennan touring the country sharing contemporary poetry and song in Ulster Scots. I've met people in the countryside of Antrim not only with an interest in it, but speaking it day to day. Just because you haven't personally encountered these people doesn't mean they don't exist.
> now you've decided they exist
This is quite unfriendly. I made a clear distinction between what you were claiming--a single protestant community who are collectively embarrassed by Ulster Scots--and the collection of people with a shared background who identify as protestants for the sake of anti-discrimination laws, but who are otherwise diverse in their beliefs and opinions. To say that in so doing I somehow conceded your original claim is again disingenuous. It also seems absurd in relation to your broader point to now insist that just because some politician decided a form should say "protestant community" that that is necessarily reflective of an on-the-ground reality.
> There are more Irish classes running in East Belfast than for Ulster Scots.
By your definition of native speakers everyone in East Belfast is already brought up speaking Ulster Scots at home, so of course there's more interest in other languages. There are more people from East Belfast attending Irish classes than English classes too, it doesn't mean no one is interested in English.
You asked for opinions and you got opinions. I can't disprove your claims about who you've met and what language they were speaking. I can only say it's at odds with my experience.
>By your definition of native speakers everyone in East Belfast is already brought up speaking Ulster Scots at home
But reading and writing in it? And would they agree they're speaking Ulster Scots or would they say it's English?
>There are more people from East Belfast attending Irish classes than English classes too
Did you not learn English in school? I find it hard to believe English isn't taught in East Belfast schools. And that's not counting English as a second language classes for immigrant communities. What language is the signage in in East Belfast?
My comments are entirely aside from the dialect vs. language argument as a miniscule minority care about Ulster Scots in NI as a language in its own right - comparative even to say Cant or Shelta - versus the usual Stormont tomfoolery like 'cash for ash' scandals.
Simply put, Ulster Scots prominence in legislation is merely a reflection of bad-faith political negotiations by Unionists to degrade the status of the Irish Language Act by proxy. Anyone on the ground knows it for the dog-whistle that it is, used simply to curry favour with a particularly sectarian unionist base in as a counter to the Irish Language provisions outlined and agreed to in the Good Friday Agreement.
This has more or less been the case ever since the forced Ulster plantations lead to the development of Ulster Scots as a defined community with resilient Protestant and unionist ties. It'd be far more credible if Fingal tried to secede from Dublin and the Republic tomorrow morning using Yola as a justification.
In short, the ILA and promotion of Gaeilge in the north is about trying to make some small reparation at a state level for a cultural genocide perpetrated by our Colonists, and to help re-establish the oldest written vernacular language in western Europe, dating back over 2,500 years.
The promotion of Ulster Scots however... well the Commissioner is literally called 'Commissioner for Ulster Scots and Ulster British Tradition'. This is after DUP members removed themselves from the equality and good relations group after basically fillibustering for 5 years of discussions on bi-lingual signs to force a stalemate.
Haha I just added it as a fun fact, I don't actually believe folks will need to start retraining things, or that this is likely to be at the top of the priorities list for anyone. Party programmes are aspirational anyway.
Not sure what happened there but your link disproves your statement.
Specifically, the link says two things:
1. That 2 parties want to add *limburgish* to the list, not frisian. That's the bottom-right part of The Netherlands, about as far removed from Friesland as you can get (which is the top part of the Netherlands).
2. That one party wants to add Frisian, but, that is a one-day fly party that will cease to exist in a few hours as they will get 0 seats in this election and will presumably call it a day right after. It was a party founded to support one person and that person has quit due to workstress, and is highly unlikely to return as this _was_ his return. Their opinion used to be relevant as they had 13.3% of the seats this past session (and didn't exist before it). But, it isn't here.
Whoops yeah, misremembered - didn't reread as I posted the link. Was more of a fun off-the-cuff remark, so didn't spend too much energy on it. But yes, I meant Limburgish rather than Frisian.
Not a question, but - Tatoeba could use your help! It is an open source (both code and data) dataset of parallel sentences and their Maltese data is very lacking. Also it’s pretty fun to just translate a bunch of random sentences into a language you speak. :-)
I don't have much personal experience in attempting to communicate with arabic speakers. From others I have heard Lebanese arabic is the closest and you can have a passable conversation.
Not sure which Tunisians are claiming this but they'd definitely need a lot more than minimum effort. Maltese split off from Arabic around 1k years ago. The two languages sound pretty different, and are written with different alphabets.
As an Algerian, I can confirm that Maltese is surprisingly easy to understand. I was genuinely shocked the first time I heard it because the similarities are so obvious. Many Arabic dialects are also written using the Latin alphabet, especially online and on social media, so the different writing systems aren’t really a barrier at all.
Calling BS on this one. I'll let ChatGPT handle it... it says it better than I could:
can arabic people understand maltese?
That’s a really interesting question — and the answer is: *partially, but not easily.*
Here’s why:
### Linguistic roots
Maltese is a *Semitic language*, and its *core grammar and basic vocabulary* come from *Arabic*, specifically from *Siculo-Arabic*, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta about 1,000 years ago. Because of that, *many Maltese words sound familiar* to Arabic speakers — especially from the *Maghrebi (North African)* or *Levantine* dialects.
For example:
| Maltese | Meaning | Similar in Arabic |
| ------- | ------- | ----------------- |
| Dar | house | دار (dar) |
| Kelb | dog | كلب (kalb) |
| Seba | seven | سبعة (sabʿa) |
| Xemx | sun | شمس (shams) |
### Influence from Italian and English
However, over the centuries, Maltese absorbed *a lot of Italian (especially Sicilian)* and *English* vocabulary — so modern Maltese is *a hybrid*. Roughly:
* 30–40% of its vocabulary is Semitic (Arabic origin),
* 40–50% is Romance (mostly Italian/Sicilian),
* and the rest is English and other sources.
That means Arabic speakers might *recognize some words and structures*, but they’ll *struggle to understand full sentences*, especially because:
* Pronunciation has changed,
* Grammar evolved differently,
* Many everyday words are not Arabic anymore.
### Summary
So:
* *Yes*, Maltese and Arabic share a deep connection — like cousins.
* *No*, they’re *not mutually intelligible* today.
An Arabic speaker might catch words here and there, but a real conversation would be hard without studying Maltese.
The above is exactly my experience with Arabic speakers by the way. Again, not surprising after 1k years of divergence.
Tunisian dialect must have split of at the same time, because it's as far from arabic as maltese is. most arabs don't understand our dialect (fortunately we also speak standard arabic which we learn at school). I read some research saying maltese/tunisian is a separate language called lingua franca
I recently discovered Maltese existed, and started learning it that day. I find it such an awesome language, and not just because of the letter Ħ
I do wonder what natives think and feel about the longevity of their language? What is taught in schools at what ages (assuming English is in the mix somewhere). Is there enough media in Maltese for Malti to go about the moderns at fully in Maltese? It’s shockingly hard to find any information on Maltese, and even harder to find content.
I’m not sure if’s dying out, or in danger thereof; if there are preservation efforts, or if there is no need.
Native Maltese speaker here. It is thought in schools alongside English, with both being official national languages. Most people locally, that are not foreign born or immigrants speak the language, and it is used in most households as the main language. But everyone grows up bilingual, as English is essential for most everything else that we do as a nation.
How are loan words viewed? Do businesses work in Maltese? Are monolingual speakers of the language regarded differently than those fluent in English? Do young people in Malta listen to Maltese music?
Maltese has been loaded with loan words since forever. 5 points if you can guess where bonġu, bravu and mappa come from. At some point there was some literary council for the language that decided that any new loan words should just be spelled phonetically. Computer became kompjuter.
Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.
Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.
On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.
Not sure if I should be get bonus points for that, but if mappa means map, the ultimate origin is still Semitic. Latin seem to have took the word maappa from a Canaanite language. The word mappa (and it's older version "manpa") is attested in Minshnaic Hebrew (meaning a napkin or a tablecloth), although you could say Hebrew "re-loaned" the cartographic meaning - which is much newer.
I can concur. All older words (think any word that was needed since the older generations), are Arabic based. All the numbers, all older verbs etc. 'Newer' words are latin based.
Interesting, but I get the impression that ubiquitous English loan words in seemingly every language is a lot different than loan word patterns of the past. Do you think? Maybe not?
I'm actually really curious about everyday usage of the language; is code switching between English and Maltese more common than Maltese on its own? I've seen a few online communities where the vocabulary switches between Maltese and English very often which is interesting but I wonder how much of that is just online / written versus everyday speech.
Depends on where you live and how you were brought up, but for the most part code switching is default.
There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.
Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.
How is "Marsaxlokk" really pronounced? I've heard that word a few times, but never from a native. Google translate can't help me here, as it doesn't seem to have Maltese text-to-speech.
From what I have heard, Lebanese Arabic is the closest, and still pretty far. Passable conversation is possible.
Maltese is definitely its own language. Arabic roots are there (theres a Semitic joke in there ) but it isn't arabic anymore. Its written left to right with a variant of the english alphabet.
Writing RTL or LTR and alphabet alone don't make a language different.
Hindi and Urdu are 90% the exact same language, and are mutually inteligible (Urdu speaker and Hindi speaker can have complete full conversation with each other) but each is written differently (one LTR the other RTL) and with different alphabets
See also Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. I also find Chinese to be interesting, e.g. Mandarin and (formal) Cantonese have a near identical written language, while the spoken language is completely different, views on whether or not those languages are different languages or dialects vary wildly.
In my books, the distinction between languages and dialects are so arbitrary that the best method is simply to ask the people that speak those languages/dialects. If they consider them to be different language (which Maltese speakers seemingly do) I call them different languages.
Mandarin-Cantonese is very interesting and a unique (to my knowledge) example where the same written language can be completely different to two different people.
I don't buy the argument of just asking the speakers. There are cultural, political, etc. reasons people may think things which don't conform with reality. Many Hindi-Urdu speakers get insulted by the reality that the languages are pretty much the same because they don't want to identify with people from another country their country is constantly at war with.
I know that the reverse understanding isn't too bad from chatting with a Saudi-born member of staff on holiday in Malta.
I don't think anyone would seriously consider it a dialect of Arabic though with its completely different alphabet and half the vocabulary and morphology coming from Italian languages/dialects, even if Malta hadn't spent the best part of a millennium trying very hard not to become part of the Arab world
I was thinking about separating the two groups when I was writing this but was afraid of getting too verbose, though in retrospect that probably would have made more sense regardless of the historical lineage. My apologies if this came off as inconsiderate.
I updated my original comment, and learned a good amount about that dispute as a result, so thanks for calling it out.
I think some people get touchy about them being lumped together if their last period of commonality (per the article) was 1400 BCE. For comparison, I believe all the Slavic languages were mutually intelligible around 1200 AD. But much more recently than this, in the last few centuries, there have been notable attempts by east slavs to absorb the Baltic language cultures and deny them.
I may be off by 100-200 years, but this is what I read. There were accents and regionalisms but they were all mutually intelligible.
It is an example I think of often, about how quickly languages can change. In the scale of 1000 years, a lot changes. Most of the diversity in Romance languages is from around that timescale too, it really started to diverge substantially around 900ad-1100ad.
Depends on your standards, too. Even today, any pair of slavic speakers should have a head start in understanding each other. Put them next to each other for a month and they should be talking, at least about basic everyday things.
I was in Crimea for about 2 weeks (in 2012) they split me Russian there. I couldn't understand a word they said. And I didn't learn to understand than for 2 weeks of travel there.
I could understand some words from Ukrainian (I traveled by train from Lviv).
Another example is Croatian, I've been there on vacation and renting a room. I couldn't understand a word they said and didn't learn any.
TlI can understand some Czech (because this is the closest language together with Slovakian to Polish) but that's it.
I wouldn't mix Slavs from different groups together. They evolved separately and are as close as English and German.
Well there is if you go far enough. It's just the question when did they split off from each other. However there is no question that Baltic and Slavic are more closely related to each other than any other non extinct Indo-European languages.
The fact they they are the closest surviving relatives on it own doesn't mean it makes sense to group them together (i.e. Italo-Celtic is also a theorized subgroup in a similar way but nobody is disputing that Celtic and Italic languages evolved into distinct groups).
Then there is a huge amount of missing links and unknown unknowns. e.g. Thracian and Dacian probably were also pretty close to Baltic or Slavic (maybe even closer to Baltic than Slavic is but we don't know enough about them to make any conclusive claims at all... but we at least know these languages existed)
Plenty of wrong here, considering Lithuanian and Latvian are utterly unintelligible to slavs, save for loanwords, but Slavic languages between themselves retain some level of intelligibility, which even spawned two competing constructed languages.
Yup, most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic. While the division from the Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Belarussian, Ukranian, etc) is distant, they are still Slavic. From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.
I regret being that loose with the designation :), Romanian and Hungarian are valid counter arguments.
In my mind, I was thinking of the belt of countries between Russia and Central Europe, starting from the Baltics down to the Balkan (excluding Greece).
Even by your definition, I can count at least seven countries where the official language is not Slavic. And that's not even including all the Altaic, Romance and other assortment of regional languages, many of which have some sort of official status.
Some of my fellow Romanians will also claim they're Central European, but in my mind, all the ones I listed are Eastern European countries. I'd even include Turkey and Kazakhstan in there, part of the latter is to the West of the Urals, which is what we normally consider the border between Europe and Asia.
That's cute. It is clear thats an outdated political organization and not geographical. Read at the groupings. Greece is more eastern than Albania (and it is one hour off timezone), and it says 'western' which is not the case by any geographic means.
“There’s a question” implies that there is a ground truth that might be discovered to resolve this rather than simply a clash of different purely arbitrary definitions of the same terms.
The Visegrad 4 (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)are generally taken to be "Central European". The strict East/West division is largely a product of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.
No, the distinction into West/Central/East Europe was also relevant in the centuries prior. You're right with, that East Europe starts with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
Ah, yes, how could I forget! As a side note, though also Finno-Ugric then similarity in sound and appearance from Finnish or Estonian at least appears very far.
Cappadocian Greek is Greek heavily mixed with Turkish, to the extent that is arguably better viewed as a distinct Hellenic language rather than just a nonstandard Greek dialect. However, around a century ago, most Greek speakers were expelled from Turkey and deported to Greece (and the same happened in reverse, most Turkish-speakers in Greece were deported to Turkey), including almost all Cappadocian-speakers - and they and their descendants largely switched to standard modern Greek - with the result that it was long believed that Cappadocian had died out in the 1960s, although more recently it has been discovered that there remain small populations of Cappadocians in rural Greece keeping the language alive.
Seems like the model isn't limited to those though, from the paper:
> as well as some additional relevant languages (Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Galician, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian).
The paper also goes into detail on training set sources, which I feel like a curation thereof might be considered the main contribution of this publication?
Flemish is more of a political construct than linguistic, it's a grouping of belgian-dutch the coastal, brabant and limburg language groups with each having their own regional dialects.
It's more than political. In speaking Flemish is to Dutch as UK English is to US English. In writing however there is no difference in spelling, but there is a difference in word choice.
Now, being from Belgium, even within that small part of the country where everybody is supposed to speak Dutch, I genuinely don't understand people from near the coast, which was about 150 miles from where I used to live.
Well yes, the dialects are very distinct linguistically, but what is often referred to as Flemish is the Dutch "tussentaal" aka "verkavelingsvlaams"[1]. That's not really a language per se, it's a regiolect of the official Dutch language, itself a Dutch variant of the Brabant dialects. The Flemish Dutch is usually used a lingua franca because the official Dutch otherwise sounds too formal (and native dialect speakers are foreign language speakers of Dutch). If I was to nominate a regional language for recognition it would more be the regional dialects like Brugs, Gents, Antwerps, Brussels Vloms, Hasselts, etc.
What I find interesting is that the differences in Flemish dialects make them much more distinct than what would normally call dialects. There are significant grammatical difference beyond the usual vocabulary differences. For instance, coastal Flemish conjugates yes and no[1], Limburgisch is a tonal language.
I think those 24 languages reflect all the languages that are official languages at country level.
So for instance, Basque is not an official language of any country (only French in France and Spanish/Castilian in Spain). Belgium's official languages are French, Dutch, and German, "Flemish" is only a local variant of Dutch (Belgian French is also only a local variant of French).
Official is a weird concept though. Turns out Dutch law never really bothered to define an official language, Dutch simply is the de facto standard and is required for a lot of things making it effectively the standard. This makes Dutch Sign Language the only language officially recognised by law. An attempt to recognise Frysian and Dutch as official languages in the constitution failed.
Sweden didn't have an "official" language before the Language Law of 2009. Five minority languages (Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Sámi, Yiddish) were officially recognized as such since 1999.
In the US, people will resort to fisticuffs, over variants of Spanish. I usually translate into Castilian Spanish, because that seems to be the equivalent of "Vanilla" Spanish. No one is really happy (except the Spaniards), but I'm not accused of favoritism.
For what it’s worth, Castilian sounds very odd to American ears. For a good time you can ask «¿en castellano?» and be met with either a blank stare or laughter.
Basque is an official language and declared as such in the Spanish constitution however restricted only to the regions that decide to apply it (Basque Country and Navarra).
If we want to go all legal, I believe that Spanish/Castilian is the only official language of the State, so at country level, with the other "Spanish languages" only official in their respective areas:
Section 3
(1) Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.
(2) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes.
(3) The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be specially respected and protected. [1]
Not sure that should be the qualifier, there might be more people able to speak Basque in the world than Danish, doesn't stop Danish from being well supported.
Quick google points to about 1M Basque speakers in the EU against 5-6M Danish speakers, there's also the fact that Basque is not the only official language in the country it belongs to, and that it's in fact not spoken in the vast majority of the country.
>One of the EU’s founding principles is multilingualism.
>This policy aims to:
>communicating with its citizens in their own languages
>protecting Europe’s rich linguistic diversity
>promoting language learning in Europe
With this in mind, the first intention fails by an enormous margin, given that 95%+ of Spain doesn't speak an iota of Basque, the second is met handily, given the long history of the language, and I'm not sure what to think about the third, any language whatsoever would serve that purpose.
Norwegian is not on this list, because in fact no country with Norwegian as their national language is part of the European Union at the time of writing.
"Norwegian" isn't just one unified language and Norway isn't in the EU.
That being said, the Scandinavian languages all come from old Norse, and modern national constructs aside, most of the people in the those areas descend from the same mix of Germanic tribes. There's no denying that modern-day Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are very similar.
English is an official EU language because Regulation 1 Article 1 says so [0] and hasn’t been changed. In practice, English is the most widely used language in EU institutions, so it would be have been silly to remove it after Brexit.
English at this point has stopped culturally belonging to the United Kingdom and whilst one can discus it's not so very moral way of getting there, it's become the bridge language for people of different languages to communicate in, further solidified by the internet.
That said, whenever there is a language selection UI (e.g. at banking machines or institutional websites) in wider Europe that uses flags to represent languages -- probably not a good idea to start with, but very common -- the Irish tricolour should be used to indicate English rather than the UK or USA flags. (although cf Airteagal 8 of Bunreacht na hÉireann).
Cool, so the European Union and overlapping institutions could see this as an opportunity to promote greater public knowledge about one of their respective member states. Seems like an argument in favour of encouraging the display of a member state's flag rather than that of a non-member-state or former member state (especially given that state's history with respect to Ireland).
Using flags alone is already poor UI since there are many languages which spill across the borders into multiple member states and non-member states, and some member states with multiple official and commonly spoken languages.
But a menu item that reads: [Irish flag] (English) like one that reads [Swedish flag] (Svenska) does not seem worse than the legacy use of the UK flag or the popular use of the US one.
AFAIK Ireland only listed Gaelic as their official language with UK having English. That caused a bit of a problem during Brexit since technically English wasn't officially an EU language anymore. I guess they resolved it somehow.
Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language.
Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are the three Uralic languages.
All the others are Indo-European, Greek being the only Hellenic one, Irish the only Celtic, the rest are Baltic, Slavic, Italic, or Germanic.
(I originally used the term Balto-Slavic, though I was unaware of some of the connotations of that term until just now. Baltic and Slavic do share a common origin, but that was a very very long time ago)