Our default image of Europe is a modular one, consisting of countries neatly fitting together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, each with its own colour and shape, each fitted snugly against neighbouring pieces with different colours. The names of states, of peoples and of languages in most cases are homonyms, which reinforces this neat modular template: in Germany live the Germans who speak German, in Portugal live the Portuguese who speak Portuguese, in Denmark live the Danes who speak Danish, etcetera. Even though everyone realizes that this is a simplification (as becomes immediately obvious from the cases of Britain, Belgium and Switzerland), our knowledge of the non-congruence between states and language areas is on the whole far less specific than it should be. Of the European states, only a very few can be considered monolingual: e.g. Iceland and Portugal. Practically all states have different languages and language areas within their borders.

It is useful, therefore, to outline a linguistic profile of Europe to counterbalance the overriding and insidiously distortive trend to organize cultural patterns by nationstate. In the following outline, I do not take into account the languages which have recently become established in various parts of Europe as a result of post-1945 immigration (Berber, Arabic, Hindi, Sranan Tongo, etc.).

Non-Indo-European languages

Most of the languages of Europe belong to the great ‘Indo-European’ language family. Some languages, however, stand apart from that Indo-European group. These include:

• – Saami (the language of the Saami of Lapland, in Northern Finland, Sweden and Norway);

• – Finnish and its related neighbour, Estonian;

• – Hungarian;

• – Turkish (also spoken on Cyprus and by communities in Greece, Bulgaria and Macedonia);

• – Maltese (related to the Arabic dialects of North Africa);

• – Basque;

• – and Hebrew (the liturgical language of the Jews).

These languages are mutually unrelated, except in the case of Finnish/Estonian and Hungarian – their mutual relatedness is, however, remote.

Individually separate Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages of Europe fall, on the whole, into four main branches: the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and Romance clusters. However, some Indo-European languages stand apart from these four main clusters, and take up an individually separate position.