I’m going to go with Russian — the vast majority live on the far side of the Urals (thus placing them in Asia). Russian, as a language, was established in Europe (Kiev Rus) thus making it a European language.
Portuguese. Some of the other answers have more speakers outside Europe, but since the question asks about the ratio of speakers outside Europe to speakers inside Europe, I’m going with Portuguese. Only about 1 in 20 native Portuguese speakers lives in Europe.
I was going to say Portuguese but since that’s taken I’ll go with Low Franconian West Germanic (i.e., Afrikaans). It’s a European language and I’m sure there are some few folks living in the EU zone that are native speakers.
My guess is Polish, since I have heard that as many Poles live in Chicago as in Warsaw. Other than that, I would guess a Baltic language like Latvian or Lithuanian, since the small populations and high percentage of ex-pats would tip the ratio.
Polish is not really a native language for many people outside Poland – much like Greek where there is an enormous diaspora, many citizens of which maintain the language as secondary languages and for liturgical purposes. But as a primary language past that first generation? No.
I think Turkish is second, to the extent Turkish could be considered a European language. About 6 million Turks live in Istabul (Europe), while there are 60 million Turks in the rest of Turkey, which is in Asia, plus another 10 million or so native Turkish speakers in the rest of the world. That puts the ratio at about 1:11 European to non-European native speakers.
rb1971: I was going to say Portuguese but since that’s taken I’ll go with Low Franconian West Germanic (i.e., Afrikaans). It’s a European language and I’m sure there are some few folks living in the EU zone that are native speakers.
That’s a good answer, though whether Afrikaans is a European language is subject to debate.
My guess is Yiddish. The question asks for a ratio, so a couple of thousand old guys in New York has a very high ratio to in Europe where most were killed by the Nazis.
Cato The Elder: The Dutch had a fairly large colonial empire at one point. Why are there so few speakers of the language outside the Netherlands nowadays?
The Dutch empires were mercantile, and they planted few settlers (and exterminated few native populations). Also, most of the Dutch empire was conquered by other European powers ~350 years ago. But the ratio of ‘population of areas that used to be owned by the Dutch and now speak European languages’ to ‘current population of the Netherlands’ is pretty high.
I’m going to go with Russian — the vast majority live on the far side of the Urals (thus placing them in Asia). Russian, as a language, was established in Europe (Kiev Rus) thus making it a European language.
Actually, the vast majority of Russian-speakers live on the European side of the Urals. Siberia is very thinly populated.
My guess is Yiddish. The question asks for a ratio, so a couple of thousand old guys in New York has a very high ratio to in Europe where most were killed by the Nazis.
Actually, most chassidic and charedi (“ultraorthodox”) Jews speak yiddish as a primary language. Prof. Volok’s ethnologue web site says there are over 2,000,000 Yiddish speakers worldwide, so if 70,000 live in Europe, then Yiddish wins.
Actually, most chassidic and charedi (“ultraorthodox”) Jews speak yiddish as a primary language. Prof. Volok’s ethnologue web site says there are over 2,000,000 Yiddish speakers worldwide, so if 70,000 live in Europe, then Yiddish wins.
The question is not as simple as it seems: by “language” do you mean a language family that exists in modern Europe, or do dialects and other exotics count? That is, does “French” mean the dialect spoken in and around Paris, “German” as High German, English as RP (which would include, say, Scots English)?
If the former, then Portuguese is probably the winner (assuming we discount Yiddish as an exotic) (bearing in mind that Portugese is a close cousin to Spanish, and in fact there are several “Spanish” languages). But if we can treat dialects as “languages”, then I’m guessing that one of the many now-rare (or rare in Europe) German dialects would win (e.g. Amish or Pennylvania Dutch, which does not appear to exist in Europe at all, or Afrikaans a branch of early modern Dutch, which itself is closely related to Low German) spoken by millions in Africa and just about nowhere else. French and Spanish and English are remarkably uniform outside Europe (setting aside slight variances in vocabulary and grammar, as well as the expected accent differences) – probably reflecting the melting pot aspect of their respective colonial experiences – whereas most of the German dialects traveled abroad in more discrete groups (and today there are huge variations within Germany still – e.g. Rhenish and Bavarian), and many of those early dialects have since melted away into High German or one of the broader regional dialects.
ys:
Wow!
It’s native to Alsace and surrounding areas. That’s where it comes from.
“Native” in this context means “the first language learned and spoken by an individual.” A person’s primary language is not necessarily his native language; my grandfather’s native language was Norwegian, but his primary language was English.
I’d say Arabic. Evidently there are 10 million Arabic speakers in Europe and ~200 million outside of Europe; ratio is 20:1. Ratio for Portuguese is 170:10 or 17:1.
Karl Schmidt:
“Native” in this context means “the first language learned and spoken by an individual.”A person’s primary language is not necessarily his native language;my grandfather’s native language was Norwegian, but his primary language was English.
And? For many haredi, Yiddish is their native language as well as their primary one. They speak English only with outsiders.
The Ethnologue Web site: http://www.ethnologue.com/home.asp plus a search of each language shows that Portuguese might be the correct answer. There are only ten million native Portuguese speakers in Portugal but there are 177 million Portuguese speakers outside Portugal. That means there 17 million plus Portuguese speakers outside Europe for every one million speakers inside Europe. However, the data seem to include speakers of Portuguese as a second language in Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome, and Guinea Bissau.
In comparison, there are 28 million Spanish speakers in Spain while there are 328 million Spanish speakers outside Spain (almost 12 million non-European Spanish speakers for every European Spanish speaker). Again the problem of “native speakers” rears its head. Many First Nation people groups (Canadian patois for Native Americans) study Spanish as a second language.
The data for English is identical to that for Spanish. There are about 58 million speakers of English in the UK and Ireland versus about 328 million English speakers outside Europe (about 6 million non-European speakers for every European speaker of English). We are not sure if these figures include speakers of English as a second language.
It seems to me that the “native speakers” part of the original question is misleading. The concept of “native speaker” is a shifting signifier in this age of globalization. Some non-native speakers of English or Spanish or French speak a version of the language that would be considered grammatically superior to the vernacular of some “native speakers.”
Finally, if you put a German, A French citizen, a Swede, an Arab, a Mexican, a Japanese, an African, an Indian, a Greek, an Italian, a Turk and a Russian in the same room. What language will they speak? American English of course!
David M. Nieporent: And? For many haredi, Yiddish is their native language as well as their primary one. They speak English only with outsiders.
As was certainly the case for practically all Yiddish speakers in Europe (and is for those few that are still left). There are almost no people in Europe or elsewhere whose native language is not Yiddish but Yiddish becomes their primary one. There were of course some who learned it well to communicate but not as a primary language. John Paul II, who was fluent in Yiddish, was one notable example.
I would have said Portuguese, but I think Yiddish does win.
How can Yiddish not be considered a European language?
It originated in Europe, and was spoken only in Europe for centuries.
Then some Yiddish speakers settled elsewhere, and then the Yiddish community in Europe was destroyed or exiled.
Question: how many “Yidophone” Jews left Europe after World War II? For instance, many Soviet Jews had been Yiddish-speaking. It’s possible that a) Soviet Jews (living in areas not occupied by Germany) were a large part of the surviving Yidophones and b) most of these Yidophones left when emigration became possible in the 70s and 80s.
Incidentally, one area outside Europe to which Yiddish speakers migrated was Soviet Asia, though not in great numbers. But the numbers remaining in Europe became so small that this would be a factor.
There was also I think a natural assimilation process, due to Yiddish speakers being a small minority in a major-language milieu. Compare the declines of Welsh and Irish Gaelic.
Portuguese. Portugal. -Mozambique Brazil ( its the 4th most spoken language in the world)
Spanish Spain 50 million ( 10 million have it as second language-)-Latinamerica and the USA ,400 m
Afrikaans has changed enough in South Africa to no longer be considered the same as its European source language and most of the words it has passed to other languages like English (such as animal names) are distinctly African in origin. It is an Indo-European language and a Germanic language, but not a European language.
Turkish and Arabic may be spoken by native speakers in Europe, but are not “European languages.” Both arose outside Europe (Turkish in Central Asia outside Turkey, Arabic in the Near East), and both have “centers of gravity” outside Europe. Turkish also loses to Portugese in European to non-European ratio. Hebrew too should not qualify as a European language, despite the fact that it lived as a liturgical language in Europe in a period where it was rarely spoken elsewhere.
Yiddish is plausible. With 70,000 native speakers in Europe, you’d need about 1.3 million native speakers elsewhere, mostly Israel and the U.S. you’d think. But, I am inclined to think that 1.3 million is still too high for the number of native non-European Yiddish speakers, relatively to proxies like the ultra-orthodox populations of the U.S. and Israel.
There may be more Latin speakers outside Europe than within it, but very, very few in other locale would be native speakers.
Romani is spoken overwhelming in Europe despite non-European diapora populations.
French has lots of non-European speakers, but probably not 1 billion plus needed to surpass Portugese.
Russia population is so disproportionately European that it is not a fit.
Portugese clearly has English beat on the native speaker in Europe to the native speaker outside Europe ratio. And, “native speaker” does have a fairly clear meaning as referring to the language one was raised to speak first. Galician, a sister tongue of Portuguese also fails to match Portuguese.
Gaelic originated in Ireland rather than the continent, so it either isn’t a European language on the theory that the British Isles aren’t in Europe, or is a European language spoken predominantly in Europe. Welsh has a significant number of non-European speakers, but Wales has more.
Russian could never be a candidate. During the Soviet Union, approximately 60% of it’s former citizens spoke Turkic languages natively (Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar, etc). Not to mention, a large portion of European Russia is comprised of people speaking languages other than Russian as a primary native language (Ukrainian, Belorussian). It would be interesting to what extent historical linguistics are considered. If we consider Indo-European, than what about Hindi? It more than likely originated in continental Europe and is now spoken by quite a large proportion of the Indian subcontinent. In the end, I’d have to agree with Portuguese, but this is an interesting question for certain…
If the former, then Portuguese is probably the winner (assuming we discount Yiddish as an exotic)
Yiddish is a dialect of German, and arose in the Rhineland. It is NOT an exotic to Europe. Its grammar and the vast majority of its words are German, though it is written in the Hebrew alphabet (as is Ladino, the Sephardic language).
Furthermore, almost all speakers of Yiddish are native speakers. Almost all Yiddish speakers also speak the native language of the country wherein they live, and few people bother to learn it unless they join a Yiddish-speaking community of Jews.
Austrian. The only speaker is a US resident (tho there’s plenty of unsubstantiated rumors that he might even be a US citizen), but he might not qualify for the question because his native language is Flimflamish.
Ladino. Originated in Spain. Wikipedia reports 1000 speakers in Greece, 8000 in Turkey (depending on where they are in Turkey, and how you place Turkey as far as being in Europe or Asia), and 100K in Israel.
If you only count the ones in Greece, that’s >100:1. If (say) half of the ones in Turkey, that’s still over 20:1.
I’m convinced that Klingon is a form of English, because speaking it involves shouting a couple words of Klingon and following it up with fluent English. At least, that’s what I get from watching Star Trek.
The numbers for native Portuguese speakers seem to me to be significantly undercounted above:
Brazil: 195 Million
Angola: 20 Million
Mozambique: 22 Million
East Timor: 1 Million
Guinea Bissau 1.5 Million
This ignores the liklihood that the population of Brazil is materially undercounted as well as a few small African nations and the very few native Portuguese speakers left in Asia (Macau, Southern India and Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore) but still comes to no fewer than 239.5 million people throughout the Lussophone world outside of Portugal.
I think that the answer to the question therefore, is clearly Portuguese. Such a large percentage of its speakers (and the media output in the language) are outside of Europe that the Brazilian accent (particularly that of Southeastern Brazil where most of the soap operas followed throughout the Lussophone world are produced) has become the quasi standard throughout the entire world outside of Portugal (and increasingly within it).
Ladino. Originated in Spain. Wikipedia reports 1000 speakers in Greece, 8000 in Turkey (depending on where they are in Turkey, and how you place Turkey as far as being in Europe or Asia), and 100K in Israel.
If you only count the ones in Greece, that’s >100:1. If (say) half of the ones in Turkey, that’s still over 20:1.
Ladino wins. With my Ashkenazi ethnocentrism, I didn’t realize there were native, primary speakers of Ladino left.
Though there’s a bit of a dialect continuum issue (some consider it a dialect of Spanish).
Ladino probably is as much a language as Catalan or Gallego.
PersonFromPorlock: Incidentally, wouldn’t the more pertinent question be about non-European languages inside Europe? Especially if the answer is “Arabic?”
It would be interesting to extend the question globally. Do any other continents have a language (native to that continent) which is far more prevalent (in terms of number of L1 speakers) outside of the continent than in it?
Depends on what you mean by “European language”? , Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque are European languages but are quite separate from the other native languages of Europe which are all Indo-European.
If by “European” you mean Indo-European, the answer is possibly Hindustani/Urdu which is/are Indo-European with some few millions of speakers in Europe but many hundred millions on the Indian sub-Continent.
However, English is probably what would otherwise come to mind. About 60 million native speakers in Europe, with surely upward of 250 million plus in the USA and then there’s Canada, most of the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand in addition to middle/upper class Indians as well as scattered communities on Pitcairn, Tristan da Cunha, the Falklands, American Samoa and such: a ratio of between 6 or 7:1
Or, maybe, Luxemburgisch.
Or Friesian.
Or Macedonian.
Oh, in the name of Saint Patrick, banish the snakes of ignorance from the Isle of our Incertitude and tell us, like a good chap, before the Guinness takes hold and we fall upon each other with shillelaghs and bring the question to decision in the time-honored way which this day itself sanctifies.
Um, Professor Volokh, are we going to get an answer on this? I think the vast resources of the VC readership have been tapped. Inquiring (but obviously not brilliant) minds want to know!
Anon Y. Mous says:
Latin.
March 16, 2010, 12:14 pmMark Field says:
Portuguese.
March 16, 2010, 12:14 pmHauk says:
Portuguese?
March 16, 2010, 12:14 pmAtomic says:
Ah… I’d bet on Spanish, French, and Portuguese in that order.
March 16, 2010, 12:15 pmJoeSixpack says:
I was going to go with Portuguese but will take a flyer on Spanish.
March 16, 2010, 12:16 pmJoeSixpack says:
D’oh!
March 16, 2010, 12:17 pmOrenWithAnE says:
I’m going to go with Russian — the vast majority live on the far side of the Urals (thus placing them in Asia). Russian, as a language, was established in Europe (Kiev Rus) thus making it a European language.
March 16, 2010, 12:17 pmsilverpie says:
I’d guess Portuguese first, then English (although a lot there depends on how many in India are counted as “native” speakers of English…)
March 16, 2010, 12:17 pmDeezRightWingNutz says:
English
March 16, 2010, 12:18 pmPhatty says:
I was going to say Spanish, but since that was already chosen, I’ll go with English.
March 16, 2010, 12:18 pmAeon J. Skoble says:
English?
March 16, 2010, 12:19 pmPeteP says:
English
March 16, 2010, 12:19 pmcs says:
Yiddish?
March 16, 2010, 12:29 pmbyomtov says:
I was going to say Spanish, but cs’ suggestion of Yiddish sounds like a better guess.
March 16, 2010, 12:33 pmLuke says:
Portuguese at ~183 million : ~10 million (Spanish is ~700 million : ~40 million, English ~600 million : at least 62)
March 16, 2010, 12:34 pmPhil Smith says:
What the hell. Flemish!!
March 16, 2010, 12:40 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Esperanto?
March 16, 2010, 12:42 pmgeokstr says:
Austrian
March 16, 2010, 12:43 pmCrunchy Frog says:
Klingon
March 16, 2010, 12:47 pmPubliusFL says:
Portuguese. Some of the other answers have more speakers outside Europe, but since the question asks about the ratio of speakers outside Europe to speakers inside Europe, I’m going with Portuguese. Only about 1 in 20 native Portuguese speakers lives in Europe.
March 16, 2010, 12:48 pmSteve says:
I would think Portuguese, Spanish, and English in that order.
March 16, 2010, 12:50 pmleo marvin says:
Ferengi
March 16, 2010, 12:51 pmrb1971 says:
I was going to say Portuguese but since that’s taken I’ll go with Low Franconian West Germanic (i.e., Afrikaans). It’s a European language and I’m sure there are some few folks living in the EU zone that are native speakers.
March 16, 2010, 12:54 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Icelandic Norse, which has zero native speakers inside Europe. Assuming Iceland’s not ‘within’ Europe, of course.
March 16, 2010, 12:57 pmgab says:
I’m going with Basque.
March 16, 2010, 1:00 pmHauk says:
Turkish?
March 16, 2010, 1:05 pmEugene Volokh says:
I think the answer is Portuguese.
Luke: The numbers I’ve seen for Spanish native language speakers are considerably less than 700 million, though I’m open to persuasion.
Cs, Byomtov: The numbers given in Wikipedia suggest that Yiddish doesn’t beat Portuguese on this, but I’m open to persuasion.
OrenWithAnE: I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of Russians, and in particular of native Russian speakers, live in Europe.
March 16, 2010, 1:12 pmDustin says:
My guess is Polish, since I have heard that as many Poles live in Chicago as in Warsaw. Other than that, I would guess a Baltic language like Latvian or Lithuanian, since the small populations and high percentage of ex-pats would tip the ratio.
March 16, 2010, 1:15 pmTulkinghorn says:
Polish is not really a native language for many people outside Poland – much like Greek where there is an enormous diaspora, many citizens of which maintain the language as secondary languages and for liturgical purposes. But as a primary language past that first generation? No.
March 16, 2010, 1:27 pmrb1971 says:
@PersonFromPorlock: My Swedish coworker says Iceland is in Europe even tho I loved your answer. I figure she is just angling for an invasion.
March 16, 2010, 1:35 pmGunner says:
I think Turkish is second, to the extent Turkish could be considered a European language. About 6 million Turks live in Istabul (Europe), while there are 60 million Turks in the rest of Turkey, which is in Asia, plus another 10 million or so native Turkish speakers in the rest of the world. That puts the ratio at about 1:11 European to non-European native speakers.
March 16, 2010, 1:39 pmPubliusFL says:
That’s a good answer, though whether Afrikaans is a European language is subject to debate.
March 16, 2010, 1:42 pmKen Arromdee says:
My guess is Yiddish. The question asks for a ratio, so a couple of thousand old guys in New York has a very high ratio to in Europe where most were killed by the Nazis.
March 16, 2010, 1:57 pmCato The Elder says:
The Dutch had a fairly large colonial empire at one point. Why are there so few speakers of the language outside the Netherlands nowadays?
March 16, 2010, 2:04 pmWaste93 says:
Portugese
March 16, 2010, 2:26 pmEugene Volokh says:
Ken Arromdee: The Wikipedia page that I linked to above reports that there are about 70,000 Yiddish speakers in Europe.
March 16, 2010, 2:27 pmAnonsters says:
Ahem.
March 16, 2010, 2:31 pmAnonsters says:
Here’s a more authoritative source for such information:
http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp
March 16, 2010, 2:34 pmJB says:
The Dutch empires were mercantile, and they planted few settlers (and exterminated few native populations). Also, most of the Dutch empire was conquered by other European powers ~350 years ago. But the ratio of ‘population of areas that used to be owned by the Dutch and now speak European languages’ to ‘current population of the Netherlands’ is pretty high.
March 16, 2010, 2:42 pmIlya Somin says:
I’m going to go with Russian — the vast majority live on the far side of the Urals (thus placing them in Asia). Russian, as a language, was established in Europe (Kiev Rus) thus making it a European language.
Actually, the vast majority of Russian-speakers live on the European side of the Urals. Siberia is very thinly populated.
March 16, 2010, 2:55 pmAstrix and Oblix says:
Plautdietsch. I don’t think there are hardly and native speakers in Germany, Poland or the Ukraine, but there are some in the Americas.
March 16, 2010, 3:47 pmNowMDJD says:
Actually, most chassidic and charedi (“ultraorthodox”) Jews speak yiddish as a primary language. Prof. Volok’s ethnologue web site says there are over 2,000,000 Yiddish speakers worldwide, so if 70,000 live in Europe, then Yiddish wins.
March 16, 2010, 3:54 pmMark Field says:
The post was limited to native languages.
March 16, 2010, 4:34 pmys says:
Wow!
March 16, 2010, 4:45 pmIt’s native to Alsace and surrounding areas. That’s where it comes from.
Spitzer says:
The question is not as simple as it seems: by “language” do you mean a language family that exists in modern Europe, or do dialects and other exotics count? That is, does “French” mean the dialect spoken in and around Paris, “German” as High German, English as RP (which would include, say, Scots English)?
If the former, then Portuguese is probably the winner (assuming we discount Yiddish as an exotic) (bearing in mind that Portugese is a close cousin to Spanish, and in fact there are several “Spanish” languages). But if we can treat dialects as “languages”, then I’m guessing that one of the many now-rare (or rare in Europe) German dialects would win (e.g. Amish or Pennylvania Dutch, which does not appear to exist in Europe at all, or Afrikaans a branch of early modern Dutch, which itself is closely related to Low German) spoken by millions in Africa and just about nowhere else. French and Spanish and English are remarkably uniform outside Europe (setting aside slight variances in vocabulary and grammar, as well as the expected accent differences) – probably reflecting the melting pot aspect of their respective colonial experiences – whereas most of the German dialects traveled abroad in more discrete groups (and today there are huge variations within Germany still – e.g. Rhenish and Bavarian), and many of those early dialects have since melted away into High German or one of the broader regional dialects.
March 16, 2010, 5:06 pmKarl Schmidt says:
“Native” in this context means “the first language learned and spoken by an individual.” A person’s primary language is not necessarily his native language; my grandfather’s native language was Norwegian, but his primary language was English.
March 16, 2010, 5:11 pmsmitty says:
Pennsylvaina Dutch, which is actually the German dialect from around Heidelberg.
March 16, 2010, 5:13 pmThis is just another outburst of that pro-Amish bias from EV. ;)
hattio says:
So,
March 16, 2010, 5:14 pmWhen do we get an answer Professor Volokh?
GSP says:
Flemish.
March 16, 2010, 5:45 pmJoe Schlessinger says:
I’d say Arabic. Evidently there are 10 million Arabic speakers in Europe and ~200 million outside of Europe; ratio is 20:1. Ratio for Portuguese is 170:10 or 17:1.
March 16, 2010, 5:54 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
And? For many haredi, Yiddish is their native language as well as their primary one. They speak English only with outsiders.
March 16, 2010, 6:09 pmLeo Eko says:
The Ethnologue Web site: http://www.ethnologue.com/home.asp plus a search of each language shows that Portuguese might be the correct answer. There are only ten million native Portuguese speakers in Portugal but there are 177 million Portuguese speakers outside Portugal. That means there 17 million plus Portuguese speakers outside Europe for every one million speakers inside Europe. However, the data seem to include speakers of Portuguese as a second language in Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome, and Guinea Bissau.
In comparison, there are 28 million Spanish speakers in Spain while there are 328 million Spanish speakers outside Spain (almost 12 million non-European Spanish speakers for every European Spanish speaker). Again the problem of “native speakers” rears its head. Many First Nation people groups (Canadian patois for Native Americans) study Spanish as a second language.
The data for English is identical to that for Spanish. There are about 58 million speakers of English in the UK and Ireland versus about 328 million English speakers outside Europe (about 6 million non-European speakers for every European speaker of English). We are not sure if these figures include speakers of English as a second language.
It seems to me that the “native speakers” part of the original question is misleading. The concept of “native speaker” is a shifting signifier in this age of globalization. Some non-native speakers of English or Spanish or French speak a version of the language that would be considered grammatically superior to the vernacular of some “native speakers.”
Finally, if you put a German, A French citizen, a Swede, an Arab, a Mexican, a Japanese, an African, an Indian, a Greek, an Italian, a Turk and a Russian in the same room. What language will they speak? American English of course!
March 16, 2010, 6:21 pmys says:
As was certainly the case for practically all Yiddish speakers in Europe (and is for those few that are still left). There are almost no people in Europe or elsewhere whose native language is not Yiddish but Yiddish becomes their primary one. There were of course some who learned it well to communicate but not as a primary language. John Paul II, who was fluent in Yiddish, was one notable example.
March 16, 2010, 6:27 pmFreddy Hill says:
Irish!
Because tomorrow everybody is Irish.
March 16, 2010, 7:06 pmRich Rostrom says:
I would have said Portuguese, but I think Yiddish does win.
How can Yiddish not be considered a European language?
It originated in Europe, and was spoken only in Europe for centuries.
Then some Yiddish speakers settled elsewhere, and then the Yiddish community in Europe was destroyed or exiled.
Question: how many “Yidophone” Jews left Europe after World War II? For instance, many Soviet Jews had been Yiddish-speaking. It’s possible that a) Soviet Jews (living in areas not occupied by Germany) were a large part of the surviving Yidophones and b) most of these Yidophones left when emigration became possible in the 70s and 80s.
Incidentally, one area outside Europe to which Yiddish speakers migrated was Soviet Asia, though not in great numbers. But the numbers remaining in Europe became so small that this would be a factor.
There was also I think a natural assimilation process, due to Yiddish speakers being a small minority in a major-language milieu. Compare the declines of Welsh and Irish Gaelic.
March 16, 2010, 7:20 pmjcm says:
Portuguese. Portugal. -Mozambique Brazil ( its the 4th most spoken language in the world)
March 16, 2010, 7:23 pmSpanish Spain 50 million ( 10 million have it as second language-)-Latinamerica and the USA ,400 m
ohwilleke says:
Portugese seems like a clear winner.
Afrikaans has changed enough in South Africa to no longer be considered the same as its European source language and most of the words it has passed to other languages like English (such as animal names) are distinctly African in origin. It is an Indo-European language and a Germanic language, but not a European language.
Turkish and Arabic may be spoken by native speakers in Europe, but are not “European languages.” Both arose outside Europe (Turkish in Central Asia outside Turkey, Arabic in the Near East), and both have “centers of gravity” outside Europe. Turkish also loses to Portugese in European to non-European ratio. Hebrew too should not qualify as a European language, despite the fact that it lived as a liturgical language in Europe in a period where it was rarely spoken elsewhere.
Yiddish is plausible. With 70,000 native speakers in Europe, you’d need about 1.3 million native speakers elsewhere, mostly Israel and the U.S. you’d think. But, I am inclined to think that 1.3 million is still too high for the number of native non-European Yiddish speakers, relatively to proxies like the ultra-orthodox populations of the U.S. and Israel.
There may be more Latin speakers outside Europe than within it, but very, very few in other locale would be native speakers.
Romani is spoken overwhelming in Europe despite non-European diapora populations.
French has lots of non-European speakers, but probably not 1 billion plus needed to surpass Portugese.
Russia population is so disproportionately European that it is not a fit.
Portugese clearly has English beat on the native speaker in Europe to the native speaker outside Europe ratio. And, “native speaker” does have a fairly clear meaning as referring to the language one was raised to speak first. Galician, a sister tongue of Portuguese also fails to match Portuguese.
Gaelic originated in Ireland rather than the continent, so it either isn’t a European language on the theory that the British Isles aren’t in Europe, or is a European language spoken predominantly in Europe. Welsh has a significant number of non-European speakers, but Wales has more.
March 16, 2010, 7:27 pmNizzok says:
Russian could never be a candidate. During the Soviet Union, approximately 60% of it’s former citizens spoke Turkic languages natively (Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar, etc). Not to mention, a large portion of European Russia is comprised of people speaking languages other than Russian as a primary native language (Ukrainian, Belorussian). It would be interesting to what extent historical linguistics are considered. If we consider Indo-European, than what about Hindi? It more than likely originated in continental Europe and is now spoken by quite a large proportion of the Indian subcontinent. In the end, I’d have to agree with Portuguese, but this is an interesting question for certain…
March 16, 2010, 8:16 pmAdam says:
Icelandic. Lots of Icelanders in the States and Canada, while a very small population in Iceland.
March 16, 2010, 8:27 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Enh. I said “Portuguese” immediately, but that’s just because I reread Orson Scott Card’s Speaker For the Dead last week.
March 16, 2010, 9:23 pmNowMDJD says:
Yiddish is a dialect of German, and arose in the Rhineland. It is NOT an exotic to Europe. Its grammar and the vast majority of its words are German, though it is written in the Hebrew alphabet (as is Ladino, the Sephardic language).
Furthermore, almost all speakers of Yiddish are native speakers. Almost all Yiddish speakers also speak the native language of the country wherein they live, and few people bother to learn it unless they join a Yiddish-speaking community of Jews.
March 16, 2010, 9:51 pmA. Criminal says:
Austrian. The only speaker is a US resident (tho there’s plenty of unsubstantiated rumors that he might even be a US citizen), but he might not qualify for the question because his native language is Flimflamish.
March 16, 2010, 10:23 pmSenator Christmas says:
Ladino. Originated in Spain. Wikipedia reports 1000 speakers in Greece, 8000 in Turkey (depending on where they are in Turkey, and how you place Turkey as far as being in Europe or Asia), and 100K in Israel.
If you only count the ones in Greece, that’s >100:1. If (say) half of the ones in Turkey, that’s still over 20:1.
March 16, 2010, 10:30 pmMark Field says:
Will someone please let me know when the Supreme Court rejects the petition for rehearing on this issue?
March 16, 2010, 11:45 pmcorneille1640 says:
I’m convinced that Klingon is a form of English, because speaking it involves shouting a couple words of Klingon and following it up with fluent English. At least, that’s what I get from watching Star Trek.
March 17, 2010, 8:10 amAfrânio says:
The numbers for native Portuguese speakers seem to me to be significantly undercounted above:
Brazil: 195 Million
Angola: 20 Million
Mozambique: 22 Million
East Timor: 1 Million
Guinea Bissau 1.5 Million
This ignores the liklihood that the population of Brazil is materially undercounted as well as a few small African nations and the very few native Portuguese speakers left in Asia (Macau, Southern India and Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore) but still comes to no fewer than 239.5 million people throughout the Lussophone world outside of Portugal.
I think that the answer to the question therefore, is clearly Portuguese. Such a large percentage of its speakers (and the media output in the language) are outside of Europe that the Brazilian accent (particularly that of Southeastern Brazil where most of the soap operas followed throughout the Lussophone world are produced) has become the quasi standard throughout the entire world outside of Portugal (and increasingly within it).
March 17, 2010, 8:39 amPubliusFL says:
Good one. Though there’s a bit of a dialect continuum issue (some consider it a dialect of Spanish).
March 17, 2010, 8:46 amNowMDJD says:
Ladino wins. With my Ashkenazi ethnocentrism, I didn’t realize there were native, primary speakers of Ladino left.
Ladino probably is as much a language as Catalan or Gallego.
March 17, 2010, 9:04 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Incidentally, wouldn’t the more pertinent question be about non-European languages inside Europe? Especially if the answer is “Arabic?”
March 17, 2010, 9:48 amPubliusFL says:
It would be interesting to extend the question globally. Do any other continents have a language (native to that continent) which is far more prevalent (in terms of number of L1 speakers) outside of the continent than in it?
March 17, 2010, 9:56 amPubliusFL says:
To answer my own question, one example may be Romani. The language originated in the Indian subcontinent, but the speakers live mostly in Europe.
March 17, 2010, 10:03 amliamascorcaigh says:
Depends on what you mean by “European language”? , Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque are European languages but are quite separate from the other native languages of Europe which are all Indo-European.
If by “European” you mean Indo-European, the answer is possibly Hindustani/Urdu which is/are Indo-European with some few millions of speakers in Europe but many hundred millions on the Indian sub-Continent.
However, English is probably what would otherwise come to mind. About 60 million native speakers in Europe, with surely upward of 250 million plus in the USA and then there’s Canada, most of the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand in addition to middle/upper class Indians as well as scattered communities on Pitcairn, Tristan da Cunha, the Falklands, American Samoa and such: a ratio of between 6 or 7:1
Or, maybe, Luxemburgisch.
Or Friesian.
Or Macedonian.
Oh, in the name of Saint Patrick, banish the snakes of ignorance from the Isle of our Incertitude and tell us, like a good chap, before the Guinness takes hold and we fall upon each other with shillelaghs and bring the question to decision in the time-honored way which this day itself sanctifies.
March 17, 2010, 3:50 pmAstrix and Oblix says:
Um, Professor Volokh, are we going to get an answer on this? I think the vast resources of the VC readership have been tapped. Inquiring (but obviously not brilliant) minds want to know!
March 19, 2010, 1:21 pm