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For those curious, the 24 official languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish,
by adzm 1y ago
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)
- cyfex 1y ago> Greek being the only Hellenic one Are there really any other Hellenic languages besides Greek?
- skissane 1y agoCappadocian 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.
- zhengiszen 1y agoMaltese is derived from dialectical arabic
- rat87 1y agoWhy Italic as opposed to Romantic/Latin? I don't think there are any surviving not Latin branches of the Italic family are there?
- Qem 1y agoWhat about Basque, is it not included?
- ranc1d 1y agoBasque doesn't seem to be but Catalan, Galician are https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B
- purrcat259 1y agoI read, write and speak Maltese, AMA if you are curious about the language.
- barrell 1y agoI 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.
- lullu57 1y agoNative 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.
- ebb_earl_co 1y agoWhat is the name of Maltese in Maltese? Like “el español” in Spanish, it’s neat to know what languages call themselves
- kwk1 1y agoA term for that concept, by the way, is "endonym": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym
- kridsdale3 1y ago'ish' is a pretty universal english suffix. So Spanish is just "españ-ish".
- jim180 1y agoLithuanian and Latvian are Baltic languages. Nothing to do with Slavic...
- Telaneo 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto-Slavic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto-Slavic_languages
- asveikau 1y agoSee the section "historical dispute". 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.
- krzyk 1y agoI doubt that South Slavic and West/East Slavic were mutually intelligible at 1200 AD. I doubt West and East Slavic were. But inside those geographic groups they probably were (Czech and Polish AFAIR were around that time).
- asveikau 1y agoI 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.
- actionfromafar 1y agoDepends 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.
- Vinnl 1y agoTomorrow there are elections in the Netherlands, and two parties are proposing adding Frysian to that list: https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/10/kies-voor-taal/ https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/10/kies-voor-taal/ Best get to retraining those models.
- rzwitserloot 1y agoNot 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.
- Vinnl 1y agoWhoops 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.
- przemub 1y agoEach EU country nominates one official language for the EU, otherwise we'd have Catalan, Breton, Kashubian and many more.
- pasc1878 1y agoWhich country nominates English? The obvious suspects are Ireland and Malta which have nominated non English languages so it is not them.
- 1y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoFlemish? I remember watching a TV show in Flemish (Hotel Beau Séjour[0]), so it's prevalent enough to invest that kind of money into. What about Basque? Is that too controversial? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Beau_Séjour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Beau_Séjour
- td540 1y agolike British English vs US English, Flemish is a dialect of dutch
- unscaled 1y agoI think sentence should be easily readable to Flemish speaker: "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
- 2000UltraDeluxe 1y agoI think that sentence is easily readable for most people who speak at least one Germanic language. It's mostly true, though, even if it's a somewhat simplified view.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoAh. That makes sense. It's all Greek, to me...
- adastra22 1y agoNo, that’s the other side of the continent.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI know. It was a joke. Old-fashioned one. Get off my lawn...
- punnerud 1y agoNorwegian is also included, based on the model card: https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B
- unscaled 1y agoConsidering there are two different official written forms of Norwegian, that's not really saying enough, but I guess they mean Bokmål.
- arbuge 1y ago> Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language. It's Semitic, to be precise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
- UebVar 1y agoArabic, 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.
- findyoucef 1y agoIt'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.
- arbuge 1y ago> 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.
- findyoucef 1y agoWell well these Arabic speakers Tunisians and Algerians?
- skissane 1y agoMaltese 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.
- fsckboy 1y agoIs Ireland the only country to bring in two languages, Irish/Gaelic and English? Is English an official language of any other EU countries?
- JAlexoid 1y agoI believe Malta has English as an official language. PS: Gaelic is a more general term for Irish and Scottish. Ireland brings specifically Irish(Gaeilge in Irish) language.
- rags2riches 1y agoMalta has Maltese and English as official languages. I don't know what they bring to the EU list of official languages.
- ginko 1y agoAFAIK 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.
- layer8 1y agoEnglish 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. [0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:01958R0001-20130701 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:01...
- raattgift 1y agoThat 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).
- threesmegiste 1y agoTurkish?
- runarberg 1y agoIs official in Northern Cyprus. But as I understand it while the whole island of Cyprus is in the EU, the state of Northern Cyprus isn’t.
- sva_ 1y agoSeems 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). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16235 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16235 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?
- _kidlike 1y agoIn Greek we call our language Hellenic, and our country Hellas. "Greek" / "Greece" don't exist in the Hellenic language.
- ranadomo 1y ago> Γραικοί, Graikoí were an ancient Hellenic tribe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graecians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graecians
- 3836293648 1y agoYes it does, it was a greek colony off the southern coast of Italy, which were the primary greek connection to the romans which how the name stuck.
- adastra22 1y agoMuch like the many names for Germany.
- ks2048 1y agoFrom other comments, it seems many people don't realize that there are 11 more languages than these 24 official (this is mentioned in the paper): Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Galician, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
- jll29 1y ago+1
- amarant 1y agoI find it interesting that Norwegian isn't on the list. I have often joked that Norwegian is just a dialect of Swedish, but I never expected to get official validation like this!
- 2000UltraDeluxe 1y ago"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.
- bdhtu 1y agoNorway isn't in the EU.
- emil-lp 1y agoNorway isn't in EU, though.
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- rcbdev 1y agoNorwegian 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.
- jenadine 1y agoNo Luxembourgish?