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Which languages are spoken by people living on the European Plain?
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European Plain
Rolling expanse of the European Plain in southern Poland.
A wide variety of languages are spoken by people living on the European Plain. Almost all of these belong to the Indo-European language family, with the notable exceptions of the Finno-Ugric languages Hungarian and Finnish.1
Three major branches of Indo-European speech are represented on the plain:
- Germanic: This branch includes Dutch, Flemish, German (including the dialect of Austria), Danish, and Swedish.1
- Romance: French is the major representative of this branch on the plain, alongside Romanian, which is spoken by some inhabitants of the East European Plain.1
- Slavic: These languages are most widespread in the east. Key examples include Polish, Russian, Belorussian (White Russian), and Ukrainian, as well as Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian.1