Regional language

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A regional language is a language spoken in a part of a country - it may be a small area, a federal state or province, or a wider area.

Contents

1 Definition in international law

2 Influence of number of speakers

3 Relationship with official languages

4 Official languages as regional languages

5 See also

Definition in international law

For the purposes of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages:

"regional or minority languages" means languages that are:

traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State's population; and
different from the official language(s) of that State

Influence of number of speakers

There are many cases when a regional language can claim greater numbers of speakers than certain languages which happen to be official languages of sovereign states. For example, Catalan (a regional language of Spain and France) has more speakers than Finnish or Danish.

Relationship with official languages

In some cases, a regional language may be closely related to the state's main language or official language. For example:

Walloon, a regional language of France and Belgium, belongs to the same family of Oïl languages as French;
Scots, a regional language of the United Kingdom, belongs to the same family of West Germanic languages as English.

In other cases, a regional language may be very different from the state's main language or official language. For example:

Basque, a regional language in Spain, is non-Indo-European, and therefore unrelated to Spanish, a Romance language;
Sorbian, a regional language of Germany, is a Slavic language, and therefore distantly related to German, a Germanic language.

Official languages as regional languages

An official language of a state may also be spoken as a regional language in a region of a neighbouring state. For example:

German is a regional language of Italy;
Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language, is a regional language of Romania whose official language, Romanian is a Romance language.