Exploring the impact of language divisions on European countries

Europe has a lot of countries. It also has a lot of languages. And while these countries usually represent a specific culture, ethnicity, or nation, they don't always represent a specific language. We have three situations that usually happen. One, countries that have similar languages to each other, coming from the same origin, and belonging to the same group, like Norway, Denmark, or Sweden. Two, countries that actually share the same language, with only small differences, like Germany, Austria, and most of Switzerland. And three, countries that have more than one language within them, like Spain, Belgium or Finland. Some countries might check two or even all three of these boxes. So in order to understand how these languages are similar, how they are shared or how they divide some countries throughout Europe, I thought we could put forth a cool and interesting hypothetical question. What if each European language was its own country? This means that countries and or areas that share the same language would unite into a single one that those which have more than one language would break apart. We would also have some weird language islands, which would either have sovereignty within other states or essentially become an exclave of another nation. This will obviously never happen, but it's interesting because it allows us to understand how different countries speak the same language and how people of the same country speak different languages and why that is the case in both situations. The best way to do this is pretty simple, by looking at a map. I got this off Wikipedia and it's a simplified version that groups up the biggest languages and idioms. Further ahead, I'll show a more detailed map about which languages are in each language group, which is also important to understand language diversity in Europe. Starting from west to east, Portugal is pretty much a perfect nation state. Everyone speaks Portuguese. Sometimes it spreads a little into Spain on the border and vice versa, especially in this northeast corner. Portugal only has one other language, which is Mirandese, but it's spoken by a minuscule minority in one location only, so it's not shown on this map. And many other of these small local languages or idioms throughout Europe are also not shown. Above Portuguese is Galician, very similar to Portuguese in many ways, and spoken in the autonomous region of Galicia in Spain. Galicia has an independence movement, although not as strong as some other Spanish ones. Most of Spain speaks Spanish itself, with the exception of the eastern coast and the Balearic Islands which speak Catalan and then up north stretching into France as Catalan does as well the Basque language in the Basque country. The reason why Spain speaks different languages is likely due to the diverse nature and history of its people which throughout time were mostly divided into separate kingdoms only uniting fairly late. Then we have France which only has three other main languages that are spoken within it according to this map. Breton in the area of Brittany, German in Alsace-Lorraine and Dutch in this small northern border area. Alsace-Lorraine has been a region that has historically gone back and forth between Germany and France. And even now it's on the border with Germany, so it's normal that German is common in this area, similarly to what happens in the Dutch border. Breton is a language similar to Cornish or Welsh, essentially a Celtic language, historically spoken there and somewhat lasting until today. On the other hand, French spreads into neighboring countries as well, mostly Belgium in the province of Wallonia but also in the city of Brussels. The western cantons of Switzerland mostly speak French as well, something that spreads a little into Northern Italy. Breton is similar to Welsh and a big part of Wales speaks, precisely, Welsh. English has taken over as the main language in most of Great Britain and Ireland as well, but there are some remnants of older, also native languages in each of the British nations and islands. Irish, Scottish, Gaelic and Welsh. Further north, the Faroe Islands and Iceland all speak their own language as well, as is the case with Denmark. However, the three Nordic countries that remain have a bigger variety. Norway speaks Norwegian in its two official forms of Bokmål and Nynorsk, literally meaning book tongue and new Norwegian, respectively. Shout out to Mia for teaching me this. but there are also a few of the native Sami languages and idioms that spread throughout the country, mostly in the north. The same thing happens in Sweden. In northern Finland as well, which along with Finnish, speaks Swedish, mostly on the western coast. Going back to the Netherlands, Dutch is the only language with the exception of Frisian spoken in Friesland. North Frisian is also spoken in the northernmost German district of North Friesland, in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, but these are very minor local languages and not displayed in the simplified map. Here, German is presented as the only language in Germany, stretching into Switzerland, Austria and even Northern Italy as well as parts of Belgium, which speaks three different languages. Oh, and Switzerland also speaks Romansh, a language descended from Latin. The only major exception here, shown for Germany, is Sorbian, a West Slavic language spoken by Sorbs, which are a minority in those areas. Italy has a lot of local dialects, but here they are all gathered together in Italian, with only German, Latin, and Friulian setting themselves apart. I think these dialects are just like the many others that Italy has, but perhaps spoken by a more significant number of people to show up here, or maybe they're more different from the traditional Italian. This map also shows a small part of Sardinia speaking Catalan. I had no idea that this was the case. Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro have different languages but being similar Albanian is spoken in Albania and Kosovo which also has Serbian as a language in the very northern part of its territory. And here in the Balkans we see a big mix of language islands here and there. The biggest examples are the Turkish speaking communities in Bulgaria, Romanian in Serbia and most of all Hungarian in Serbia, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. Historically Hungary ruled many of these territories. Now, I'm not sure about this. Do these regions speak Hungarian because they were once annexed and ruled by Hungary? Or were they ruled by Hungary back then because there were already Hungarians there? Maybe it's a situation where both are true. Hungary lost all of these lands in the Treaty of Trianon after World War I to great protest of the Hungarians. They even made propaganda maps comparing their territory loss to hypothetical losses of other nations to demonstrate how intense that territory loss was. Moldova speaks mostly Romanian and then this mixture of languages here, Gagauz, I have no idea what's going on here so if you know let me know in the comments. Belarus is completely divided between Belarusian and Russian and there are also some Russian speaking communities in eastern Ukraine as well as a different language in Crimea. Russian stretches into the three Baltic nations which each speak their own language, only Estonia having South Estonian as well. North and South Estonian are separate branches of the Finnic languages. And then within Russia, there's a lot of languages, depending on the local communities, from Sami to Karelian, Tatar or even German as well. The Caucasus is the biggest mess and mixture of languages that I've ever seen. And then within Turkey, there is apparently a large number of Kurdish speakers. Turkish is also spoken in the Northern Cyprus Turkish Protectorate with the southern half of the island speaking Greek. What we can conclude from this is that if countries were to be separated by these main languages, Europe's map would look slightly different. New countries would exist, like Galicia, Brittany or Frisia, others like Belgium or Kosovo would disappear and many countries would lose or gain territory. A super Germany would exist, perhaps Yugoslavia would reunite and then we would have the issue of these small language islands. In Hungary's case, either they would have to restore their former border to reach the Hungarian-speaking population, or they would literally have exclaves all around the surrounding countries, beside gaining a little bit of immediately connected land. The second map is more detailed and it specifies way more local languages as we can see on the legend. But more importantly, it groups them up into the biggest language groups. Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Hellenic, Armenian, Uranian, Turkish, Uralic, which oddly gathers Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, Basque, Caucasian, and Afro-Asiatic, among a couple other ones. This divides Europe in way less groups. France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, along with Romania, are gathered in Romance. Romania obviously sets itself apart, since it is in its Eastern and not Western Southern Europe region. And why does it speak a Romance language that descends from Latin because, I think, of the Roman Empire. Dating all the way back to the Roman invasion of Dacia, who established it as a province, they removed many of the native Dacians, if not all, and moved in several populations from Italy, which spoke Roman Latin. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, Iceland, and Scandinavia are in the Germanic category, and then the only other major group is Slavic, shown in red. Uralic is mostly exclusive to Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, plus those surrounding areas around Hungary that were previously ruled by them. But in this map of Eurasia, which focuses on Russia, we can see the many Uralic languages, precisely along the Ural mountains, that exist. Maybe those who settled in Finland, Estonia and Hungary came from here before migrating to Europe? And if we zoom in, we can see the mixtures and differences of language that exist throughout Europe in more detail, depicting the many cultural differences that exist even within the same country and sometimes the same region. Going back to the legend, we see all the subsets of these language groups and all the main languages within them. How Germanic is different throughout, in this map we can see the biggest similarities based on color, how Romance is divided in Gallo, Rhaeto, Occitano, Ibero, Central, Sardinian and Eastern and the 14 different Slavic languages that exist and which might be common but different enough to have their own names. If we want even larger groups, we can divide countries depending on the alphabet they use in their national languages. In blue, those which use the Latin alphabet. In purple, Latin and Cyrillic. In red, Cyrillic only. In green, Greek. Cyprus uses Greek and Latin. And then Georgia and Armenia use their own. The point of all of this is to understand that Europe is not only a gathering of 40-something countries and nations, it's even more than that. Sometimes their differences reach an internal level and sometimes the bond of language goes over the human-drawn borders. If we were to have language as the main thing that sets us apart from each other, Europe would have to redraw its borders almost entirely, either forming new smaller unions based on the main language groups of Romance, Germanic, Slavic, etc. Although a Finnish-Estonian-Hungarian union would be kind of odd, paying more attention to local idioms and fully balkanizing the entire continent, or maintaining itself as it is now, which is what makes sense. Just because Austria and Germany speak a similar German, they differ in many other things and that alone isn't reason enough for them to unite. And just because Belgium doesn't have its own language and is divided between Flemish and Wallonian or Dutch and French, it doesn't mean that it should be split apart between the two neighboring countries. So, those are the languages of Europe, setting countries and people apart and sometimes bringing them together. What do you think? Would you like to see any country unite because they speak the same language? Would you want any country to annex areas that speak their language and should any country break apart, allowing each linguistic group to rule itself. Let me know in the comments along with your general opinions and thoughts about this video. Thanks so much for watching. Subscribe if you want and I will see you next time for more general knowledge.