s, they are spoken throughout Europe and particularly dominate Western Europe. Among these subgroups are the Romance, Germanic and Slavic branches.
The Romance languages are spoken by about 600 million people across the globe. All of these languages derive from Latin, and the five national standard languages that are recognized include French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. On the other hand, the Germanic languages are spoken on every continent by about 450 million people. Most people here speak English, but German, Dutch and even the Scandinavian languages remain spoken in former colonies all over the world.
The Slavic languages are spoken in Eastern Europe and Russia, this is the harder of the three language groups to learn. They are most closely related to the Baltic languages of Lithuania and Latvia. For someone interested in learning Slavic languages, Polish, Serbian, Croatian and Russian are the most useful. It will probably be easier to begin with the Western languages as they use the Roman alphabet. Russian will seem very easy if Croatian or Serbian has been learned first.
MIDDLE EAST LANGUAGES
The top three languages, in terms of numbers of speakers are Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Various other languages are also spoken in the Middle East.
Arabic is the most widely spoken language in the Middle East, being official in all the Arab countries. It is also spoken in some adjacent areas in neighboring Middle Eastern non-Arab countries.
The second-most widely spoken language is Persian. The language belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the family of Indo-European languages, and is much influenced by Arabic and Aramaic languages.
The third-most widely spoken language, Turkish, is confined to Turkey, which is also one of the region’s largest and most populous countries. It is also present in certain areas of neighboring countries as well. It is a member of the Turkic languages, which have their origins in Central Asia.