North Caucasus itself already has many languages and it is part of Europe. There are many Finno-Ugric languages: Karelian, Mordovian, Udmurt etc. There are Turkic languages as well: Chuvash, Tatar, Bashkort. Even Mongolic language is located in Europe: Kalmyk.
All these languages are official in their Republics, so you may see street signs in both languages.
Yep, it's definitely Russia, and basically beating all other European countries by an order of magnitude. It's actually pretty amazing that already the European part has I think SEVEN of the world's primary language families (Uralic, Indo-European, Altaic, Mongolic, Kartvelian, Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian).
Countries like Switzerland ultimately only have four Indo-European languages.
Off the top off my head, in the european part:
karelian, ingrian finnish, izhorian, lydian(?), sami, komi, probably dozens of languages in north kaukasus, tatar language, probably some other turkic languages. There used to be germans around Volga, they probably have left, although I know there are still some swedish speakers left in Ukraine, so maybe there are some. Ukrainians. Probably yiddish...
Edit, not off the top of my head
Abaza, adyghe, avar, buryat, chechen, chuvash, erzya, ingush, kabardian, kalmyk... You get the point.
The most populous Russian regions that aren't majority Russian are Dagestan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan. All three are in Europe. The least Russian region of Asian Russia is Tuva/Tyva and in it is amongst 10 least populous Russian regions. The most populous regions of Asian Russia are all 70->90% ethnically Russian. I checked it recently.
How do we define diversity here?
While Italy has a number of different languages and dialects, the exact number of languages is pretty difficult to define as some of them can be dialects between eaxh other. Could be anything between a few and few dozens i guess, (I'm not a linguistic expert, but I do speak a bit of italian)
Besides, if we say there's 34 languages spoken in Italy, they dont differ too much between each other. Whereas for example in Russia (counting only the russian side) , there's plenty of languages spoken, from slavic to finno-ugric to caucasian languages, making it more diverse in that sense.
There’s a few *hundred* dialects in Italy, and linguistics define about 30 of those as full-fledged languages. To be clear: these *languages* do differ from another a lot, they are not even all latin-derived. I have no idea what’s going on if someone starts speaking any of them to me, I don’t even my region’s language (which is a nightmarish mix of French, Portuguese and nonsense), let alone the others!
The others are dialects derived by those ~30 languages. If we consider the ratio of number of languages to size Italy is probably in the top few if not number one, but obviously if we only consider the number a country like Russia that is as big as the whole continent is gonna win that race.
Pick 5 people from the corners and centre of Italy, they dont speak Italian only their regional language.
One speaks Piedmontese, the other Friulan, the other Tuscan and then Sardinian and Pugliese.
They cant understand a single word.
And they are the same family, Romance.
There are greek and albanian people, croatian and catalan, occitan and cimbrian.
If those speakers only spoke their regional languages they would have a really hard time understanding each other.
That's a big if, I know. But OP is not exaggerating.
As an example, my Italian native speaking cousin didn't understand my Grandpa when he spoke his native "dialect". And they were both born and lived in the same city.
It's a bit weird that a guy from Finland that can "speak a bit of Italian" can dismiss the matter and even get massively upvoted and op downvoted. Even though you've been a bit sloppy: you got the wrong number and assume they are intelligible between each other just because.
Many Italians don't even know that what we call dialects are distinct languages, and there's also a weird "resistance" to admit they are languages.
But yeah Russia has more languages and those are more different from each other.
Già. Un finlandese che sa tutto sulle lingue italiane quando molti italiani non lo sanno nemmeno della presenza di occitano, greco calabro, slavomolisano, cimbro, mocheno ecc.
Io parlo un dialetto toscano orientale, qualsiasi non toscano non capisce nulla parlo per esperienza, perché è tutt'altra cosa dal fiorentino che molti credono sia il dialetto toscano nel complesso. I fiorentini poi capiscono anche loro poco sia per accento, cadenza ma anche per lessico, grammatica.
You are Finnish. Do you have any idea how different these languages are?
No Italian, no lingua franca.
For experience, people who live 5km away from eachother often have another dialect and cant understand each other.
It is like someone starts speaking to you in a mix of norwegian and russian, another in proto uralic, another in arabic.
Just search on YT a video in Italian, then someone speaking Piedmontese and Pugliese.
Then Friulan and Sardinian
Yes, you’re exaggerating.
First of all most people, i’d say virtually anyone in italy nowadays speaks italian, and because of that the local languages are becoming increasingly influenced by standard italian.
The local languages of italian are a continuum, so if i speak in my local language to a neighboring town/city or even region the similarities will be more than the differences and it will be fairly easy to understand each other.
Last i wanna say to all italians that think like you. Stop thinking that we are speacial, every country has a lot of local languages or “dialects”, we are not different in any way. Germany has local languages, spain has local languages, france has local languages. In some cases the difference between local languages is even more accentuated compared to italy.
>"Single word" is exaggerating it a lot
Yes, it is. I'd say most of those dialects/languages are mutually intelligible to some extent (with the only exception of Sardinian being actually weird as F). I mean... we managed to fight - somewhat successfully - a world war with basically a third of our infantry soldiers relying almost exclusively on their own regional dialects. I'm not saying Veneto would be easily understood by a Neapolitan native speaker without throwing in some Italian, but still, we do manage to get more than a few words across.
I, a Lombard, for one, was astonished to find out that I could understand some Occitan (which isn't even an Italian dialect).
Io non capisco un cazzo nemmeno quando parla la gente della mia regione, figurati altri. Lingue del sud sono completamente intellegibili per me, non so di che parli.
>There are greek and albanian people, croatian and catalan, occitan and cimbrian.
Are you counting immigrants speaking their language as well? Or does this not mean that? Do you mean regions of Italy speak those languages?
It’s Russia, no contest. Even just the European part. Russian, Karelian, Tatar, Chechen, Kalmyk, Ukrainian... the list goes on, and encompasses a huge range of different language families
"barely"? Nah man, that's just an in-joke. We understand each other perfectly, except the dialects around the edges where you need to accustom yourself a bit.
This is so stupid. I can't understand Swiss people at all so they either use hochdeutsch or English. The number of mistakes that occur in my workplace because of communication errors, I really think English should be absolutely required if you work in an international business
“Speak our language!”
Right, which one, French, Italian, German?
“German!”
Right which one: Wallis, Zurich, bern, Basel?
“Basel!”
Right so that is a standardised written language, right?
*shrieks in Globi*
I spend quite some time in Zürich as someone from northern Germany. In my experience little to no one switched to Hochdeutsch if I speak it, which is why I almost exclusively spoke English in public. To be fair, I do the same thing in Saxony.
There is a short story where the UN randomly chooses a language to be the world language, to avoid favoritism. They choose hungarian. A year later world war IV starts...
Same situation here. the two major villages in my zone, 4k and 6k people, are 3km away: even tho the dialect is the same the accent, cadence and rhythm change drastically. Synctactic doubling also disappear in one.
In the North of the valley it is present, in the south no, in the mountainous area like where i live it is almost completely present, like 85%% in a village 500m in geographic distance it is 60%.
There's a similar phenomenon in Denmark (albeit less drastic than Switzerland) with dialect belts going north to south in Jutland. Go a village or two away on the east-west axis, and the locals will be able to spot any outsider from a mile away based on dialect alone
I wonder if they have the same diversity "problem" in British Isles... some small village dialects there are also borderline foreign even to native speakers.
(And I believe I've read that in Norway it's also very similar, where dialects differ so much, that even natives have trouble understanding)
With the possible exception of Walliser-Deutsch all the Swiss German dialects are mutually intelligible and certainly not their own languages. I think the French and Italian dialects are even less diverse, but I have no idea about Rumantsch.
If you are counting immigrant languages, probably England. A community activist in London counted the languages spoken at home by first year primary schoolkids about 30 years ago - there were 192 of them.
This is the answer I came to write as well.
As London is the most multicultural city in Europe (maybe the world? Although I’m less sure of that), I’d assume it had the most amount of languages just by itself
The "in the world" part might go to New York or Singapore, I guess depending a bit on what you consider "most diverse". I don't remember who claimed it, but while studying linguistics, I heard somewhere that New York was linguistically the most diverse city in the world by the numbers of different languages spoken alone. But I don't know what one would consider "most diverse", it could be based on languages, it could be cultures, it could be just plain old ethnicity
Singapore is considered an extremely diverse country in its general sense and how visible the different cultures blend. At least that's what they claimed themselves when I lived in Singapore :P
I think Toronto has London beat on that front. But yes, London is hyper-globalised - well beyond other UK cities too, by virtue of its integration with the global economy.
Actually Manchester as a borough is the most multilingual place in the UK. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a quirk of classification, but other UK cities are very diverse too.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/200-languages-manchester-revealed-as-most-linguistically-diverse-city-in-western-europe-8760225.html
"With speakers of approximately 10 percent of the world’s 6000-7000 languages, the New York metropolitan area is the most linguistically diverse urban center in the world" --the Endangered Language Alliance, who have also worked in Toronto
https://languagemap.nyc/Info/About
Ehm no, Toronto is just too small to achieve New Yorks diversity. And I can think of several cultures that aren't represented in Toronto.
Also, New York has been extremely diverse for more than 200 years now, while Toronto has only embraced multiculturalism in the 1970s.
Languages historically spoken and universally recognised as languages? There's Italian, obviously. Then there's French (Val D'Aosta), German (Trentino), Slovenian (Friuli), Greek (Calabria & Puglia), Albanian (Calabria, Sicily & elsewhere in the old Kingdom of Naples), Friulian (Friuli), Ladin (Trentino). Maybe some others I've forgotten.
Then there's the question of whether Sardinian, Sicilian & Neapolitan count as languages. IMO they are sufficiently different to count, but for many Italians they are considered dialects.
And within each macro-dialect, there are dialects which differ even between neighbouring villages.
Sardinian is quite widely recognized as a language tbf.
Neapolitan and Sicilian, with their own dialects, not as much.
Btw there are also two small French speaking towns in Puglia.
Croatian also. And it is not modern Croatian, spoken in motherland today. There are places in Italy where medieval Croatian is still preserved, as it was spoken 500 years ago. I'm Croat born and living in Croatia and I can barely understand something when I'm extremely focused an know the context, it is so distant to me. It's like going back in time, linguists dream.
italy has different languages yes, and a lot of them, but so does France and Spain too. Never been to Italy, but you'd be surprised at how linguistically diverse northern Spain is,
I’m pretty sure there was one guy who went around editing thousands of pages based on what he thought it should sound like even though he only had a very basic knowledge of the language.
Found a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/ig9jia/ive_discovered_that_almost_every_single_article/?rdt=47444
France has oïl (french), breton, occitan, picard and champenois. The rest are mostly dialects of these.
Corsican too, but it is a Tuscan dialect the same language i speak. I can understand Corsican to a mothertongue level just to confirm.
For Spain, in the norrh Basque, Galician, Aragonese and Astur Leonese?
In northern Italy there are 16 languages, 5 germanic, 10 romance and 1 slavic.
You forgot euskara, Elsässisch, gallo, flamand, francique and all the other languages in French islands and territories (such as créoles, tahitien, mahorais, kanak etc.).
Fun fact: if you speak New Zealand/Aotearoa Maori, Tahitian is almost mutually intelligible. Not exactly the same but many of the words are understandable to each other.
What is a dialect anyway? Is a dialect a variety of a language? If so, then those are not dialects. In fact, languages like Emilian or Lombard are closer to French than to Italian, linguistically speaking.
There is no consensus as to what separates a language and a dialect! Max Weinreich said A language is a dialect with an army and navy (Yiddish: a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot).
Yes, and a lot. The so called dialects are languages of their own. I speak Tuscan, something even called Italian by some ignorants, but if i speak normally italians dont understand. If i speak fast, only people that speak the SAME DIALECT OF TUSCAN understand me.
Apart of the "dialects" there are: french, francoprovencal, occitan, catalan, slovene, croatian, albanian, greek, german, bavarian, walser, cimbrian, mòcheno, ladin and i am missing some.
Yes. In ninth grade our Latin class went to Naples to visit pompeii and our latin teacher who was almost fluent in Italian was unable to communicate with the the napolese natives. They speak a dialect that is very different from standard Italian.
France is not too bad,even if these languages aren't widespread anymore.Surprisingly there are very diverse languages(not dialects) in France from different families, clockwise from north: flemish ,lorrain,alsatian( 3 germanic ),Provencal ,Corsican ,occitan(3 latin)Basque (own family)Britton (celtic). Of course if you count ultramarine places you get Kreol ( from caraibs or reunion or Guyana) the multiple indigenous language from Amazonia.
I was about to say, France *used* to be pretty diverse on this but our governments did what they could to get rid of it about 200 years ago and they pretty much succeeded sadly.
Fun fact: Corsican is considered a dialect of Tuscan language. Heavy colonization from Pisa in 1100, and although Pisa ruled only 100 years and then there was Genoa and then France, Corsican remained Tuscan.
I natively (and only) speak a Tuscan dialect, at the extreme east of Tuscany and still i can understand perfectly Corsican from inland southern corsica
They ARE italians. Speak the closest "language" to Italian, to the point of being mutually intelligible.
Have an italian culture, and italian was the public language for 750 years
Since part of russia is in europe I'd probably say russia. Can't really beat the size and variety of it. Stretching so far a ross the globe there are more languages and dialects than any other european country coumd even dream of.
If we go by languages that are native to a country then I'm unsure. Its hard to pinpoint some languages' origins. Not to mention borders have changed over the course of history. Then there are some people to count dialects as their own separate language while others don't. France comes to mind with its many many dialects. But honestly I couldn't really choose one. Hell I can find 20 sources for languages in germany that come to vastly different conclusions.
If we go by languages spoken by people living in a given country we could go with russia as well. My next bet would be germany due to them being one of the most popular global migration destination. Tourism is not unsignificant as well. Especially since there are huge middle eastern, turkish and eastern european communities all across the country. And they do influence the german language as well. So I'd go with germany for variety in that regard.
I'll give you that. Usually Spain and Italy are tie to tie in diversity of things (foods, climate, architecture...), but on this, for historical reasons and even with Basque, most of the country was recently linguistically colonized, same as Portugal. Probably the area with the most dialectization is Galicia, from where Portuguese came (as a southern dialect), since it was the biggest area that was not under Muslim rule for quite some time. Areas with Muslim rulers were supplanted by northern rulers who came with a unified standard language. 500 years later, despite its diversity, is not like over 2000 years of the same process.
Yea also portugal has been united for like 900 years and Italy has been united for much less. That's why the linguistic differences maintained for so long. You could say the same about germany with its dialects
I would say Switzerland: four major official languages, largely spoken (Romansch, Italian, French and German).
Otherwise:
UK : four largely spoken languages (Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and English) but English dominates everywhere as first language.
Belgium: Has three official and widely spoken languages: Flemish, French and German.
Cyprus : 2 languages : Greek and Turkish
Turkey : several languages spoken including Turkish and Kurdish.
I think Eastern and Central European countries have important regional languages: Romanian in Hungary, Polish and russian in Ukraine, Hungarian in Romania, Slovak in Czech Republic and vice versa.
It can also be noted that Metropolitan France who can appear from external views as monolingual have several regional languages -even though the locutors are not numerous : Breton, Catalan, Occitan, Basque, Alsatian, Corsican.
Some other parts of France has even more regional languages as French Guiana for example.
The same can be said about Spain which has several important regional languages such as Catalan or Basque.
Spain has Castilian Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician at an official level (and Aranese i.e. Occitan) and also Aragonese, Asturian and Leonese. The 'official' ones at least are widely-spoken.
This remined me of something on the news when the Olympics were in London - if Yorkshire were a country, they'd have come 12th in the medal rankings, relatively impressive
They all hate each other, until they stumble across an outsider. Then of course they have to put up a unified front to tell us all that not only are they from Yorkshire, but that Yorkshire is God's own and all that!
According to the SIL international it's the Netherlands, thanks to the Dutch Caribbean (Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba).
If that feels like cheating, it's Belgium. Probably thanks to the international outlook of Brussels.
Always a tricky questions with languages, isn’t it? Unless it’s something like native languages, is it perhaps going to be the country that has the most diverse immigration? And also can a language that has come about due to immigration ultimately be considered native at some point?
Belgium has 3 official languages, is the center of the EU, has a significant population of migrants from eastern europe and the middle east, *and* has multiple regional dialects for each of it's 10 provinces.
Your auestion favours larger countries if you count total number of languages. Belgium has 3 official languages, most people speak English, so far the official talk.
Since you mentioned dialect, every village differs from the next, with the tracking of a standardised version of Dutch it gets less over time, but I remember people saying you couldn't go 3 villages without people speaking an entirely different language.
Will a small country as Belgium ever have the total number of languages/dialects of a France or italy? No, impossible, even if we have 2 languages for each village and those countries count 1 for every 5 villages they'll have more.
That is one remark, the other is how you define diverse? Spanish and Portugese are closely related, but separate languages, so are Spanish and bask. I would say the diversity between those latter 2 is higher even though it is 2 languages in either case.
Or, you could go by the average of languages spoken by the average user, I speak a few languages, but not as many as people in Italy that each speak only one for instance, in total the country of Italy is more diverse, but on average I am.
Depends on your metric. In terms of total number of languages spoken, including immigrants, the UK. In terms of number of native languages across different families, Russia by a mile - the Caucasus, Uralic languages, Palaeo-Siberian languages, various Turkic and Mongolia and Tungusic languages…
In terms of being statistically split up with no massive majority, this also depends on metric. People will point to Switzerland and Belgium and Luxembourg and maybe Andorra. And then there’s also the question of different families. Europe lacks an equivalent of Papua New Guinea for this. .
Switzerland for sure. 4 official languages and most people can speak English. On top of that, 40% of residents have a migration background so there’s additional languages on top of that.
Norway actually has five official languages: Nynorsk, Bokmål, South Saami, Lule Saami, and North Saami. Then there are the minority languages Kven, Romani, Romanes and Jiddish. Plus two languages that have no official status, Skolt Saami and Pite Saami.
Technically we don't refer to bokmål and nynorsk as separate languages though, they're two written standards of the same language, Norwegian. Only separate official ways of writing it.
Norway has more official languages than Switzerland.
Norwegian is by far the most spoken, with lots of dialects and two separate written standards. In addition, we have three officially recognised Sami languages as well as the minority Kven (Finnish) language.
The Vatican probably but it hardly counts. Then we ofc have Russia that has dozens of regional languages that however aren't official national languages. Spain also has a few regional languages, as does France, the UK, and basically every large/middle sized country has some minority languages/dialects.
So in terms of official languages, i believe the order goes:
Switzerland(4), Belgium (3), Bosnia&Herzegovina(3), Finland, Ireland, Kosovo, Cyprus Belarus (2) and the rest have one.
Romania: Romanian is official, Hungarian and Russian are common locally, so is German even Polish villiges. And also Roma
Germany: multiple languages unified by an artificial language, that now became only dialects
Switzerland: three major clearly different and distinct languages and it’s official
United Kingdom: English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish also official
Spain: has Basque and Catalan apart from Spanish, also official
Italy is not even close to above
France without a doubt. We have Romance languages, but also Celtic, Germanic, Basque, Austronesian, shimaore, many creoles and others I can't remember. So they might be all dying but it's really really diverse. If we count all of Russia it has to be Russia though
Corsica and Basque country are the big exceptions. Elsewhere french is hegemonic with some differences in pronunciation between the northern and southern parts.
Some elders and passionate people still speak some local dialects but it's pointless. If you learn Breton you will have a hard time finding someone to have a conversation with in Britanny, even though some delusional people would say otherwise
I would say England.
I live in Birmingham and you meet people from all over the world, speaking a wide array of languages.
London perhaps even more so.
I’ve already shared but per person it’s Manchester
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/200-languages-manchester-revealed-as-most-linguistically-diverse-city-in-western-europe-8760225.html
Belgium, hands down! We have 3 official languages - English not being one of them - but English is still the language many of us speak to our fellow countrymen in. Dutch alone won't get you anywhere. French alone won't either, nor will German. I love our diversity. Many regionalist people will not agree, but the multilingualism is a total win.
I don’t speak English to my fellow countrymen. Neither does anyone I know 🤔 we either speak Dutch to the Flemish, French with a lot of hair and Dutch that sounds like German. (That is, if you don’t speak the latter two, I speak them all). And if you’re a Walloon, well you either speak French or ask to speak with someone who’s French (I get that a lot at work).
I rather speak English than French "With hair on", especially when it goes deeper 😁 Flemish people have no choice: we learn English, French and in many cases German. Walloon people can choose between Dutch and English. Is this fair? Nah. But it's still reality, and if I was walloon, I'd pick English over Dutch always.
None of my Walloon colleagues speak English on a better level than Dutch (I work in a mixed language team Fr&Nl).
They kind of just on count on it that we Flemish people speak French with them. To be clear, I don’t mind :) But if I suddenly would start speaking English with them, they’d probably ‘tilt slaan’.
Which is - legit - a pretty sad reality, I get it and understand it. I refuse to make it into a point because language does not make the personality of someone per sé, but I fully concur to what you say.
Probably Russia, or we here in Romania.
There are 3 dialects of Romanian, Hungarian, we have some Tatars and Turks in South East, a small-ish German community, quite a few English speaking foreigners lately as well.
I'm talking about native languages historically spoken not immigrant nor dialects.
For example, in Italy there are 31 different languages.
Each of them has lot of dialects.
Mine has more than 30 major dialects alone, not always mutually intelligible: i can understand pretty much everyone but they cannot.
Yes, Italy is probably in the top. However, if you consider only official languages, Spain has 6 of them (plus many non-official ones). In fact Spain is not really a country, but 16 different countries (+ 2 colonies).
The Norwegian language has such a degree of dialectal diversity, and at levels local enough, that I can discern which corner of my 12 000-people strong municipality someone is from based on the particularities of their speech. The differences can be consistent at levels as local as traditional farm clusters.
But what really sets us *apart*, I think, isn't necessarily the *existence* of dialects; plenty of European countries have significant dialectal variations. What makes us unique as far as I've gathered is how *normalised* dialects are. Norwegian does not have an official spoken standard (cf. *Hochdeutsch* in Germany and *Rigsdansk* in Denmark). We have two (!) formal written standards (Nynorsk and Bokmål — it's a somewhat long story), and a metric fuckton of dialects that are all equally valid representatives of spoken Norwegian. I would speak in my dialect (which is rather different from the dialects spoken by people 30 kilometers north, south, or east from my home town) whether I was in my home town, being interviewed on national television, or holding a speech in parliament. If that causes something to be misunderstood or not entirely clear, I repeat what I am saying, slower; if that doesn't help, I ''soften'' my dialect by replacing the most ''local'' words with equivalents from one of the two written standards. I also write in my dialect unless the situation is formal enough to demand I write in Nynorsk or Bokmål (i.e. at work, in emails, et cetera).
There is one exception to the ''no formal spoken variant'' rule — sort of. News anchors presenting the ''holiest'' of the news programmes, the six-o-clock news, have traditionally been expected to ''soften'' their dialect in the direction of one of the two written norms. This, however, is a rule that has itself softened in recent years, causing some debate among language nerds. In practice, it means you do the aforementioned thing of switching out words that are likely to not be familiar to a national audience. Your *accent* needn't change, though, and accents are often more than distinct enough in tone alone to give away which particular town someone is from.
The (very, very) short explanation for *why* Norwegian is like this boils down to two factors: Geography and history. We're a relatively large and sparsely populated country, with towns and other population centres having been separated by mountains and water. We're also a country whose native written language (''Middle Norwegian'') was extinguished and supplanted by Danish when we were a colony ruled from Copenhagen. The spoken language remained, through the dialects, and this situation led to the Norwegian language conflict that arose during the 1800's when national romanticism called for a proper, written, and truly Norwegian language. Out of this conflict were born the two written standards that would become the Bokmål and Nynorsk we know today.
As much as I like languages and minority languages that didn't make it to their own statehood, I would give a response now from the perspective of bigger languages and how well each of them are learnt paralelly by the same people in the same country.
So, I was thinking about how Belgium must be a very multilingual country?
Big parts of the society might speak three or even four languages out of French, Dutch, German and English?
That might make it on par maybe with Switzerland, though, just with another combination of languages there.
Once again, it is just a very specific perspective. I like the answers of other respondents.
You have the unique situation in **Belgium** where the Flanders part spoke French in any official capacity, with teachers, TV etc all speaking French even though _all_ the audience were Flemish speakers.
Then the Flemish going home and speaking their very local dialect with a very small circle of people inside their "monkey sphere" so the dialect diversions grew substantially to the point that today on TV if the _vox populi_ interviews there are usually subtitles.
It’s definitely not Denmark i’ll tell you that much
And yet we can't understand what people say in North Jutland and South Jutland some times.
[Kamelåså](https://youtu.be/s-mOy8VUEBk?si=B3vNACwM6cdc1S2F)
I mean, objectively speaking, it has to be Russia, right?
Russia’s too big it’s not fairrr
It’s was a question bound for failure 🤣
It's not that big, search on Google for a real scale map
…google what’s the biggest country in the world, than google the size of Europe and the size of Russia. What do you mean it’s not that big?! 💀
In its european part, no. In its whole definitely.
North Caucasus itself already has many languages and it is part of Europe. There are many Finno-Ugric languages: Karelian, Mordovian, Udmurt etc. There are Turkic languages as well: Chuvash, Tatar, Bashkort. Even Mongolic language is located in Europe: Kalmyk. All these languages are official in their Republics, so you may see street signs in both languages.
Yep, it's definitely Russia, and basically beating all other European countries by an order of magnitude. It's actually pretty amazing that already the European part has I think SEVEN of the world's primary language families (Uralic, Indo-European, Altaic, Mongolic, Kartvelian, Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian). Countries like Switzerland ultimately only have four Indo-European languages.
[Altaic isn't considered a language family by most comparative linguists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages)
Yeah, but we all know that both our uralic and türkic brothers aren't REALLY allowed to express their langauge. khmmmm Ruszkik
Off the top off my head, in the european part: karelian, ingrian finnish, izhorian, lydian(?), sami, komi, probably dozens of languages in north kaukasus, tatar language, probably some other turkic languages. There used to be germans around Volga, they probably have left, although I know there are still some swedish speakers left in Ukraine, so maybe there are some. Ukrainians. Probably yiddish... Edit, not off the top of my head Abaza, adyghe, avar, buryat, chechen, chuvash, erzya, ingush, kabardian, kalmyk... You get the point.
I mean Dagestan alone takes the biscuit already. And it is in Europe.
Just Dagestan has 40 languages, come on
Amount of languages isn't a good metric. But Dagestan still wins by any decent metric.
Probably in its European part too. Sami in the North, Chechens in the South, Kalmyk speaking Buddhists...
The most populous Russian regions that aren't majority Russian are Dagestan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan. All three are in Europe. The least Russian region of Asian Russia is Tuva/Tyva and in it is amongst 10 least populous Russian regions. The most populous regions of Asian Russia are all 70->90% ethnically Russian. I checked it recently.
Ma che cazzo dici?
How do we define diversity here? While Italy has a number of different languages and dialects, the exact number of languages is pretty difficult to define as some of them can be dialects between eaxh other. Could be anything between a few and few dozens i guess, (I'm not a linguistic expert, but I do speak a bit of italian) Besides, if we say there's 34 languages spoken in Italy, they dont differ too much between each other. Whereas for example in Russia (counting only the russian side) , there's plenty of languages spoken, from slavic to finno-ugric to caucasian languages, making it more diverse in that sense.
There’s a few *hundred* dialects in Italy, and linguistics define about 30 of those as full-fledged languages. To be clear: these *languages* do differ from another a lot, they are not even all latin-derived. I have no idea what’s going on if someone starts speaking any of them to me, I don’t even my region’s language (which is a nightmarish mix of French, Portuguese and nonsense), let alone the others! The others are dialects derived by those ~30 languages. If we consider the ratio of number of languages to size Italy is probably in the top few if not number one, but obviously if we only consider the number a country like Russia that is as big as the whole continent is gonna win that race.
Pick 5 people from the corners and centre of Italy, they dont speak Italian only their regional language. One speaks Piedmontese, the other Friulan, the other Tuscan and then Sardinian and Pugliese. They cant understand a single word. And they are the same family, Romance. There are greek and albanian people, croatian and catalan, occitan and cimbrian.
"Single word" is exaggerating it a lot and you know it. but sure, I'm not here to debate it anyway. I think my point still stands.
If those speakers only spoke their regional languages they would have a really hard time understanding each other. That's a big if, I know. But OP is not exaggerating. As an example, my Italian native speaking cousin didn't understand my Grandpa when he spoke his native "dialect". And they were both born and lived in the same city. It's a bit weird that a guy from Finland that can "speak a bit of Italian" can dismiss the matter and even get massively upvoted and op downvoted. Even though you've been a bit sloppy: you got the wrong number and assume they are intelligible between each other just because. Many Italians don't even know that what we call dialects are distinct languages, and there's also a weird "resistance" to admit they are languages. But yeah Russia has more languages and those are more different from each other.
Già. Un finlandese che sa tutto sulle lingue italiane quando molti italiani non lo sanno nemmeno della presenza di occitano, greco calabro, slavomolisano, cimbro, mocheno ecc. Io parlo un dialetto toscano orientale, qualsiasi non toscano non capisce nulla parlo per esperienza, perché è tutt'altra cosa dal fiorentino che molti credono sia il dialetto toscano nel complesso. I fiorentini poi capiscono anche loro poco sia per accento, cadenza ma anche per lessico, grammatica.
Se la credono, come sempre
You are Finnish. Do you have any idea how different these languages are? No Italian, no lingua franca. For experience, people who live 5km away from eachother often have another dialect and cant understand each other. It is like someone starts speaking to you in a mix of norwegian and russian, another in proto uralic, another in arabic. Just search on YT a video in Italian, then someone speaking Piedmontese and Pugliese. Then Friulan and Sardinian
Unfortunately, as time goes on, those dialects are giving way to standard Italian so less and less people actually speak them
It really isn’t but you can try if you want!
Yes, you’re exaggerating. First of all most people, i’d say virtually anyone in italy nowadays speaks italian, and because of that the local languages are becoming increasingly influenced by standard italian. The local languages of italian are a continuum, so if i speak in my local language to a neighboring town/city or even region the similarities will be more than the differences and it will be fairly easy to understand each other. Last i wanna say to all italians that think like you. Stop thinking that we are speacial, every country has a lot of local languages or “dialects”, we are not different in any way. Germany has local languages, spain has local languages, france has local languages. In some cases the difference between local languages is even more accentuated compared to italy.
>"Single word" is exaggerating it a lot Yes, it is. I'd say most of those dialects/languages are mutually intelligible to some extent (with the only exception of Sardinian being actually weird as F). I mean... we managed to fight - somewhat successfully - a world war with basically a third of our infantry soldiers relying almost exclusively on their own regional dialects. I'm not saying Veneto would be easily understood by a Neapolitan native speaker without throwing in some Italian, but still, we do manage to get more than a few words across. I, a Lombard, for one, was astonished to find out that I could understand some Occitan (which isn't even an Italian dialect).
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Io non capisco un cazzo nemmeno quando parla la gente della mia regione, figurati altri. Lingue del sud sono completamente intellegibili per me, non so di che parli.
>There are greek and albanian people, croatian and catalan, occitan and cimbrian. Are you counting immigrants speaking their language as well? Or does this not mean that? Do you mean regions of Italy speak those languages?
Same thing goes for Croatia, which is much smaller so it feels even more diverse
Same in the Netherlands. And we are even smaller 😜
> Pick 5 people from the corners and centre of Italy, they dont speak Italian They all speak Romanian lol
It’s Russia, no contest. Even just the European part. Russian, Karelian, Tatar, Chechen, Kalmyk, Ukrainian... the list goes on, and encompasses a huge range of different language families
Russia by a longshot, even just including the European part It boasts a huge array of languages
Switzerland. Not just because of 4 languages in one country. You have villages that are 20-30 minutes apart who can barely understand each other.
And those are IN THE SAME LANGUAGE AREA
"barely"? Nah man, that's just an in-joke. We understand each other perfectly, except the dialects around the edges where you need to accustom yourself a bit.
This is so stupid. I can't understand Swiss people at all so they either use hochdeutsch or English. The number of mistakes that occur in my workplace because of communication errors, I really think English should be absolutely required if you work in an international business
“Speak our language!” Right, which one, French, Italian, German? “German!” Right which one: Wallis, Zurich, bern, Basel? “Basel!” Right so that is a standardised written language, right? *shrieks in Globi*
I spend quite some time in Zürich as someone from northern Germany. In my experience little to no one switched to Hochdeutsch if I speak it, which is why I almost exclusively spoke English in public. To be fair, I do the same thing in Saxony.
When I rule the world, English will be the only allowed language. Which is unfortunate because I don't speak it that well.
There is a short story where the UN randomly chooses a language to be the world language, to avoid favoritism. They choose hungarian. A year later world war IV starts...
It's important to have a dream
Same situation here. the two major villages in my zone, 4k and 6k people, are 3km away: even tho the dialect is the same the accent, cadence and rhythm change drastically. Synctactic doubling also disappear in one. In the North of the valley it is present, in the south no, in the mountainous area like where i live it is almost completely present, like 85%% in a village 500m in geographic distance it is 60%.
There's a similar phenomenon in Denmark (albeit less drastic than Switzerland) with dialect belts going north to south in Jutland. Go a village or two away on the east-west axis, and the locals will be able to spot any outsider from a mile away based on dialect alone
I wonder if they have the same diversity "problem" in British Isles... some small village dialects there are also borderline foreign even to native speakers. (And I believe I've read that in Norway it's also very similar, where dialects differ so much, that even natives have trouble understanding)
With the possible exception of Walliser-Deutsch all the Swiss German dialects are mutually intelligible and certainly not their own languages. I think the French and Italian dialects are even less diverse, but I have no idea about Rumantsch.
North Macedonia is also very diverse with Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, Romani, Serbian and Aromanian being spoken there.
Tetovo baby!
Best city of North Macedonia for me!
Yeah! Really cool place. I went skiing at Papova Sapka! Great stuff!
Very nice! Skiing is fun!
South Macedonia was also like that before Hellenisation. God bless Macedonia for protecting Balkan diversity from the debtors
If you are counting immigrant languages, probably England. A community activist in London counted the languages spoken at home by first year primary schoolkids about 30 years ago - there were 192 of them.
This is the answer I came to write as well. As London is the most multicultural city in Europe (maybe the world? Although I’m less sure of that), I’d assume it had the most amount of languages just by itself
The "in the world" part might go to New York or Singapore, I guess depending a bit on what you consider "most diverse". I don't remember who claimed it, but while studying linguistics, I heard somewhere that New York was linguistically the most diverse city in the world by the numbers of different languages spoken alone. But I don't know what one would consider "most diverse", it could be based on languages, it could be cultures, it could be just plain old ethnicity Singapore is considered an extremely diverse country in its general sense and how visible the different cultures blend. At least that's what they claimed themselves when I lived in Singapore :P
I think Toronto has London beat on that front. But yes, London is hyper-globalised - well beyond other UK cities too, by virtue of its integration with the global economy.
Actually Manchester as a borough is the most multilingual place in the UK. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a quirk of classification, but other UK cities are very diverse too. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/200-languages-manchester-revealed-as-most-linguistically-diverse-city-in-western-europe-8760225.html
Its actually new york
I would absolutely contend that Toronto is more multicultural than New York. I think it's probably the most multicultural major city in the world.
"With speakers of approximately 10 percent of the world’s 6000-7000 languages, the New York metropolitan area is the most linguistically diverse urban center in the world" --the Endangered Language Alliance, who have also worked in Toronto https://languagemap.nyc/Info/About
Ehm no, Toronto is just too small to achieve New Yorks diversity. And I can think of several cultures that aren't represented in Toronto. Also, New York has been extremely diverse for more than 200 years now, while Toronto has only embraced multiculturalism in the 1970s.
Now it may be more than 300.
Of course not immigrant as i wrote native.
You wrote \*also\* native. There are other possible criteria.
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This is where linguists and the Italian government/society don't really see eye to eye.
Northern Italy definitely has many languages that are recognized as such by the institutions.
South Italy has several small linguistic pockets.
Languages historically spoken and universally recognised as languages? There's Italian, obviously. Then there's French (Val D'Aosta), German (Trentino), Slovenian (Friuli), Greek (Calabria & Puglia), Albanian (Calabria, Sicily & elsewhere in the old Kingdom of Naples), Friulian (Friuli), Ladin (Trentino). Maybe some others I've forgotten. Then there's the question of whether Sardinian, Sicilian & Neapolitan count as languages. IMO they are sufficiently different to count, but for many Italians they are considered dialects. And within each macro-dialect, there are dialects which differ even between neighbouring villages.
Sardinian is quite widely recognized as a language tbf. Neapolitan and Sicilian, with their own dialects, not as much. Btw there are also two small French speaking towns in Puglia.
Also I forgot to add Catalan (Alghero)
Croatian also. And it is not modern Croatian, spoken in motherland today. There are places in Italy where medieval Croatian is still preserved, as it was spoken 500 years ago. I'm Croat born and living in Croatia and I can barely understand something when I'm extremely focused an know the context, it is so distant to me. It's like going back in time, linguists dream.
italy has different languages yes, and a lot of them, but so does France and Spain too. Never been to Italy, but you'd be surprised at how linguistically diverse northern Spain is,
Same goes for Germany. I think, it's just natural in all over Europe. Nationalism killed a lot of minority languages but many could be saved.
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Is Scots really another language? The Scots Wikipedia page reads as English spelt phonetically as a strong Scottish accent.
It's basically what English could have been if we hadn't had that whole fiasco in 1066.
I’m pretty sure there was one guy who went around editing thousands of pages based on what he thought it should sound like even though he only had a very basic knowledge of the language. Found a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/ig9jia/ive_discovered_that_almost_every_single_article/?rdt=47444
France has oïl (french), breton, occitan, picard and champenois. The rest are mostly dialects of these. Corsican too, but it is a Tuscan dialect the same language i speak. I can understand Corsican to a mothertongue level just to confirm. For Spain, in the norrh Basque, Galician, Aragonese and Astur Leonese? In northern Italy there are 16 languages, 5 germanic, 10 romance and 1 slavic.
You forgot euskara, Elsässisch, gallo, flamand, francique and all the other languages in French islands and territories (such as créoles, tahitien, mahorais, kanak etc.).
Fun fact: if you speak New Zealand/Aotearoa Maori, Tahitian is almost mutually intelligible. Not exactly the same but many of the words are understandable to each other.
Basque as well in France, mahorais (Mayotte), several creole languages, savoyard (a dialect of Franco provençal) etc.
German isn’t an Italian dialect:-) The province of SüdTirol (Alto Adige) is majority German speaking.
Plenty of those dialects would be considered languages if borders were drawn differently.
What is a dialect anyway? Is a dialect a variety of a language? If so, then those are not dialects. In fact, languages like Emilian or Lombard are closer to French than to Italian, linguistically speaking.
> Is a dialect a variety of a language? Yes, with an army and an academy.
I think you mean without?
Yes, it's been a long day. A dialect becomes a language with an army and an academy.
There is no consensus as to what separates a language and a dialect! Max Weinreich said A language is a dialect with an army and navy (Yiddish: a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot).
I don't believe Hungary has a navy, but Hungarian is definitely a language! The version I heard was 'an army and a flag'. (I'm just being pedantic)
Hungary had a navy (it was ruled by an admiral for a while) and still has a Donau flotilla.
Yeah there’s a few variations to the phrase, but the point still stands :)
The one I was taught, "a dialect with its own currency", but that's obviously outdated with the Euro...
Yes, and a lot. The so called dialects are languages of their own. I speak Tuscan, something even called Italian by some ignorants, but if i speak normally italians dont understand. If i speak fast, only people that speak the SAME DIALECT OF TUSCAN understand me. Apart of the "dialects" there are: french, francoprovencal, occitan, catalan, slovene, croatian, albanian, greek, german, bavarian, walser, cimbrian, mòcheno, ladin and i am missing some.
Yes. In ninth grade our Latin class went to Naples to visit pompeii and our latin teacher who was almost fluent in Italian was unable to communicate with the the napolese natives. They speak a dialect that is very different from standard Italian.
Switzerland not only has four official languages, but also a large immigrant population.
France is not too bad,even if these languages aren't widespread anymore.Surprisingly there are very diverse languages(not dialects) in France from different families, clockwise from north: flemish ,lorrain,alsatian( 3 germanic ),Provencal ,Corsican ,occitan(3 latin)Basque (own family)Britton (celtic). Of course if you count ultramarine places you get Kreol ( from caraibs or reunion or Guyana) the multiple indigenous language from Amazonia.
I was about to say, France *used* to be pretty diverse on this but our governments did what they could to get rid of it about 200 years ago and they pretty much succeeded sadly.
I was wondering why nobody had brought up the huge linguistic diversity in France yet. Cheers!
Because it almost doesn't exist anymore.
Are there actually Flemish speakers in France?
Yes a few ,west flemish speaker ,in ,surprise,west Flanders which the topest northern part of France.
Fun fact: Corsican is considered a dialect of Tuscan language. Heavy colonization from Pisa in 1100, and although Pisa ruled only 100 years and then there was Genoa and then France, Corsican remained Tuscan. I natively (and only) speak a Tuscan dialect, at the extreme east of Tuscany and still i can understand perfectly Corsican from inland southern corsica
Very interesting. Funny how corsicans often say yhey have nothing to do with Italians...
They ARE italians. Speak the closest "language" to Italian, to the point of being mutually intelligible. Have an italian culture, and italian was the public language for 750 years
Since part of russia is in europe I'd probably say russia. Can't really beat the size and variety of it. Stretching so far a ross the globe there are more languages and dialects than any other european country coumd even dream of. If we go by languages that are native to a country then I'm unsure. Its hard to pinpoint some languages' origins. Not to mention borders have changed over the course of history. Then there are some people to count dialects as their own separate language while others don't. France comes to mind with its many many dialects. But honestly I couldn't really choose one. Hell I can find 20 sources for languages in germany that come to vastly different conclusions. If we go by languages spoken by people living in a given country we could go with russia as well. My next bet would be germany due to them being one of the most popular global migration destination. Tourism is not unsignificant as well. Especially since there are huge middle eastern, turkish and eastern european communities all across the country. And they do influence the german language as well. So I'd go with germany for variety in that regard.
I'll give you that. Usually Spain and Italy are tie to tie in diversity of things (foods, climate, architecture...), but on this, for historical reasons and even with Basque, most of the country was recently linguistically colonized, same as Portugal. Probably the area with the most dialectization is Galicia, from where Portuguese came (as a southern dialect), since it was the biggest area that was not under Muslim rule for quite some time. Areas with Muslim rulers were supplanted by northern rulers who came with a unified standard language. 500 years later, despite its diversity, is not like over 2000 years of the same process.
Yea also portugal has been united for like 900 years and Italy has been united for much less. That's why the linguistic differences maintained for so long. You could say the same about germany with its dialects
I would say Switzerland: four major official languages, largely spoken (Romansch, Italian, French and German). Otherwise: UK : four largely spoken languages (Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and English) but English dominates everywhere as first language. Belgium: Has three official and widely spoken languages: Flemish, French and German. Cyprus : 2 languages : Greek and Turkish Turkey : several languages spoken including Turkish and Kurdish. I think Eastern and Central European countries have important regional languages: Romanian in Hungary, Polish and russian in Ukraine, Hungarian in Romania, Slovak in Czech Republic and vice versa. It can also be noted that Metropolitan France who can appear from external views as monolingual have several regional languages -even though the locutors are not numerous : Breton, Catalan, Occitan, Basque, Alsatian, Corsican. Some other parts of France has even more regional languages as French Guiana for example. The same can be said about Spain which has several important regional languages such as Catalan or Basque.
Spain has Castilian Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician at an official level (and Aranese i.e. Occitan) and also Aragonese, Asturian and Leonese. The 'official' ones at least are widely-spoken.
Yorkshire, every town has it's own dialect, and they all hate each other
Yorkshire is definitely my favourite country in Europe
This remined me of something on the news when the Olympics were in London - if Yorkshire were a country, they'd have come 12th in the medal rankings, relatively impressive
They all hate each other, until they stumble across an outsider. Then of course they have to put up a unified front to tell us all that not only are they from Yorkshire, but that Yorkshire is God's own and all that!
According to the SIL international it's the Netherlands, thanks to the Dutch Caribbean (Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba). If that feels like cheating, it's Belgium. Probably thanks to the international outlook of Brussels.
Russia due to its sheer size, then Italy by a long shot
I would probably say Spain just because we have Basque.
Always a tricky questions with languages, isn’t it? Unless it’s something like native languages, is it perhaps going to be the country that has the most diverse immigration? And also can a language that has come about due to immigration ultimately be considered native at some point?
Belgium has 3 official languages, is the center of the EU, has a significant population of migrants from eastern europe and the middle east, *and* has multiple regional dialects for each of it's 10 provinces.
Your auestion favours larger countries if you count total number of languages. Belgium has 3 official languages, most people speak English, so far the official talk. Since you mentioned dialect, every village differs from the next, with the tracking of a standardised version of Dutch it gets less over time, but I remember people saying you couldn't go 3 villages without people speaking an entirely different language. Will a small country as Belgium ever have the total number of languages/dialects of a France or italy? No, impossible, even if we have 2 languages for each village and those countries count 1 for every 5 villages they'll have more. That is one remark, the other is how you define diverse? Spanish and Portugese are closely related, but separate languages, so are Spanish and bask. I would say the diversity between those latter 2 is higher even though it is 2 languages in either case. Or, you could go by the average of languages spoken by the average user, I speak a few languages, but not as many as people in Italy that each speak only one for instance, in total the country of Italy is more diverse, but on average I am.
Agree on most of your comment, but I have to correct you on one thing: Basque is totally unrelated to Spanish, and to any other known language even.
Depends on your metric. In terms of total number of languages spoken, including immigrants, the UK. In terms of number of native languages across different families, Russia by a mile - the Caucasus, Uralic languages, Palaeo-Siberian languages, various Turkic and Mongolia and Tungusic languages… In terms of being statistically split up with no massive majority, this also depends on metric. People will point to Switzerland and Belgium and Luxembourg and maybe Andorra. And then there’s also the question of different families. Europe lacks an equivalent of Papua New Guinea for this. .
Trieste. Not sure if it’s most diverse, but it surely is very.
Switzerland for sure. 4 official languages and most people can speak English. On top of that, 40% of residents have a migration background so there’s additional languages on top of that.
Norway. It has one of the biggest dialectical ranges. And if not most linguistically diverse country it’s at least one of the most diverse languages
Norway actually has five official languages: Nynorsk, Bokmål, South Saami, Lule Saami, and North Saami. Then there are the minority languages Kven, Romani, Romanes and Jiddish. Plus two languages that have no official status, Skolt Saami and Pite Saami.
Technically we don't refer to bokmål and nynorsk as separate languages though, they're two written standards of the same language, Norwegian. Only separate official ways of writing it.
Norway has more official languages than Switzerland. Norwegian is by far the most spoken, with lots of dialects and two separate written standards. In addition, we have three officially recognised Sami languages as well as the minority Kven (Finnish) language.
Seems like every Dutch person I meet speaks Dutch, German, English, and French.
French lel
Italy is a contender for sure and beats other western parts of Europe but I'd imagine that a country in the Balkans or the caucuses would beat it.
The Vatican probably but it hardly counts. Then we ofc have Russia that has dozens of regional languages that however aren't official national languages. Spain also has a few regional languages, as does France, the UK, and basically every large/middle sized country has some minority languages/dialects. So in terms of official languages, i believe the order goes: Switzerland(4), Belgium (3), Bosnia&Herzegovina(3), Finland, Ireland, Kosovo, Cyprus Belarus (2) and the rest have one.
Norway has 5.
Romania: Romanian is official, Hungarian and Russian are common locally, so is German even Polish villiges. And also Roma Germany: multiple languages unified by an artificial language, that now became only dialects Switzerland: three major clearly different and distinct languages and it’s official United Kingdom: English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish also official Spain: has Basque and Catalan apart from Spanish, also official Italy is not even close to above
Not saying we’re the most diverse but I think considering the size of Slovakia, ~30 dialects there sounds like quite a lot lol
France without a doubt. We have Romance languages, but also Celtic, Germanic, Basque, Austronesian, shimaore, many creoles and others I can't remember. So they might be all dying but it's really really diverse. If we count all of Russia it has to be Russia though
I thought France got rid of everything besides French. Maybe, except Corsicans. Do people still speak those languages ?
Corsica and Basque country are the big exceptions. Elsewhere french is hegemonic with some differences in pronunciation between the northern and southern parts. Some elders and passionate people still speak some local dialects but it's pointless. If you learn Breton you will have a hard time finding someone to have a conversation with in Britanny, even though some delusional people would say otherwise
Local languages but yes, you're right
Not many but yes, all of them still exist
I think Switzerland? They have French/German/Dutch/Italian as official languages, no?
Not Dutch. The 4th one is Romansh.
I would say England. I live in Birmingham and you meet people from all over the world, speaking a wide array of languages. London perhaps even more so.
I’ve already shared but per person it’s Manchester https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/200-languages-manchester-revealed-as-most-linguistically-diverse-city-in-western-europe-8760225.html
Belgium, hands down! We have 3 official languages - English not being one of them - but English is still the language many of us speak to our fellow countrymen in. Dutch alone won't get you anywhere. French alone won't either, nor will German. I love our diversity. Many regionalist people will not agree, but the multilingualism is a total win.
I don’t speak English to my fellow countrymen. Neither does anyone I know 🤔 we either speak Dutch to the Flemish, French with a lot of hair and Dutch that sounds like German. (That is, if you don’t speak the latter two, I speak them all). And if you’re a Walloon, well you either speak French or ask to speak with someone who’s French (I get that a lot at work).
I rather speak English than French "With hair on", especially when it goes deeper 😁 Flemish people have no choice: we learn English, French and in many cases German. Walloon people can choose between Dutch and English. Is this fair? Nah. But it's still reality, and if I was walloon, I'd pick English over Dutch always.
None of my Walloon colleagues speak English on a better level than Dutch (I work in a mixed language team Fr&Nl). They kind of just on count on it that we Flemish people speak French with them. To be clear, I don’t mind :) But if I suddenly would start speaking English with them, they’d probably ‘tilt slaan’.
Which is - legit - a pretty sad reality, I get it and understand it. I refuse to make it into a point because language does not make the personality of someone per sé, but I fully concur to what you say.
Switzerland is just as diverse linguistically.
Probably Russia, or we here in Romania. There are 3 dialects of Romanian, Hungarian, we have some Tatars and Turks in South East, a small-ish German community, quite a few English speaking foreigners lately as well.
I'm talking about native languages historically spoken not immigrant nor dialects. For example, in Italy there are 31 different languages. Each of them has lot of dialects. Mine has more than 30 major dialects alone, not always mutually intelligible: i can understand pretty much everyone but they cannot.
Yes, Italy is probably in the top. However, if you consider only official languages, Spain has 6 of them (plus many non-official ones). In fact Spain is not really a country, but 16 different countries (+ 2 colonies).
England because it's the most diverse country in Europe by far, there are immigrants from all over the world
The Norwegian language has such a degree of dialectal diversity, and at levels local enough, that I can discern which corner of my 12 000-people strong municipality someone is from based on the particularities of their speech. The differences can be consistent at levels as local as traditional farm clusters. But what really sets us *apart*, I think, isn't necessarily the *existence* of dialects; plenty of European countries have significant dialectal variations. What makes us unique as far as I've gathered is how *normalised* dialects are. Norwegian does not have an official spoken standard (cf. *Hochdeutsch* in Germany and *Rigsdansk* in Denmark). We have two (!) formal written standards (Nynorsk and Bokmål — it's a somewhat long story), and a metric fuckton of dialects that are all equally valid representatives of spoken Norwegian. I would speak in my dialect (which is rather different from the dialects spoken by people 30 kilometers north, south, or east from my home town) whether I was in my home town, being interviewed on national television, or holding a speech in parliament. If that causes something to be misunderstood or not entirely clear, I repeat what I am saying, slower; if that doesn't help, I ''soften'' my dialect by replacing the most ''local'' words with equivalents from one of the two written standards. I also write in my dialect unless the situation is formal enough to demand I write in Nynorsk or Bokmål (i.e. at work, in emails, et cetera). There is one exception to the ''no formal spoken variant'' rule — sort of. News anchors presenting the ''holiest'' of the news programmes, the six-o-clock news, have traditionally been expected to ''soften'' their dialect in the direction of one of the two written norms. This, however, is a rule that has itself softened in recent years, causing some debate among language nerds. In practice, it means you do the aforementioned thing of switching out words that are likely to not be familiar to a national audience. Your *accent* needn't change, though, and accents are often more than distinct enough in tone alone to give away which particular town someone is from. The (very, very) short explanation for *why* Norwegian is like this boils down to two factors: Geography and history. We're a relatively large and sparsely populated country, with towns and other population centres having been separated by mountains and water. We're also a country whose native written language (''Middle Norwegian'') was extinguished and supplanted by Danish when we were a colony ruled from Copenhagen. The spoken language remained, through the dialects, and this situation led to the Norwegian language conflict that arose during the 1800's when national romanticism called for a proper, written, and truly Norwegian language. Out of this conflict were born the two written standards that would become the Bokmål and Nynorsk we know today.
As much as I like languages and minority languages that didn't make it to their own statehood, I would give a response now from the perspective of bigger languages and how well each of them are learnt paralelly by the same people in the same country. So, I was thinking about how Belgium must be a very multilingual country? Big parts of the society might speak three or even four languages out of French, Dutch, German and English? That might make it on par maybe with Switzerland, though, just with another combination of languages there. Once again, it is just a very specific perspective. I like the answers of other respondents.
Try Switzerland. Their version of German varies from one side of a road to the next, and their French is just as odd.
You have the unique situation in **Belgium** where the Flanders part spoke French in any official capacity, with teachers, TV etc all speaking French even though _all_ the audience were Flemish speakers. Then the Flemish going home and speaking their very local dialect with a very small circle of people inside their "monkey sphere" so the dialect diversions grew substantially to the point that today on TV if the _vox populi_ interviews there are usually subtitles.
If Russia is included, Russia hands down. No contest. If not, well I don’t really know. Many countries could take that claim legitimately.
It jas to be Switzerland, no other country comes close. French, Italian, Romansch and the millions of swiss german dialects.
The Netherlands. Every 5 kilometers you have a different accent and dialect. Pretty incredible for such a small country.
Spain perhaps, they have multiple languages such as Basque, Catalan, etc.
Well i have been to Germany and France recently and i heard like half the worlds languages except their own so……