Linguae Europaeae

by Sidney Schroepfer Sidney Schroepfer is a senior in psychology and Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sidney’s future plans include applying to graduate school for clinical psychology and volunteering in ESL classrooms. He wrote this blog post in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in Fall 2021.  Before beginning this blog post, I would like to thank my host parent, Tere, and the professors from the University of Deusto. Thanks to them, my study abroad experience had a major impact in understanding myself and the world around me, and I gained a deep connection to the city, its languages, and its people. In this blog I interweave my observations from a typical metro commute with research that demonstrates where and how Euskara is used. And therefore, demonstrates how a salient Basque identity is being shaped. First, I paint Bilbao’s context through a brief history lesson. The Basque language, Euskara, is a language isolate (Urban, 2021). It has no perc...

by Karol Funez Karol Funez is a senior in Political Science and Global Studies at The University of Illinois. Karol is planning to work in sales after graduation and is interested in Law, she hopes to attend law school in the near future. She wrote this blog post in 418 'Language and Minorities in Europe' course, in spring 2019.  One of the best-known and highest ranked soccer teams in the world; known for having soccer players such as Lionel Messi; is the Football Club Barcelona (FC Barcelona). My family follows Spain’s soccer league very closely and, naturally, are huge fans of FC Barcelona. Usually, both, before and after soccer matches, the soccer players will have either press conferences or interviews. As a Spanish speaker myself, I would notice when soccer players would switch from Spanish to a language that sounded like Spanish but was not. I later learned that this language is called Catalan. Catalan is a Romance language that developed two thousand years ago and remai...

by Robin Turner. Robin Turner is a PhD student in French Lingustics at the University of Illinois.  Robin's future academic plans include investigating the social situation of spearkers of regional languages living in different political nation states.  Robin wrote this blog post in the 418 'Languages and Minorities in Europe' course in Spring 2019. Most people consider Basque to be quite a mysterious language. Basque is the only non-Indo-European language in Western Europe, and linguists do not know where this language came from. Usually, linguists can figure out the roots for a language based on samples of historical writing and the vocabulary of other languages that are related to it, which is known as language families. Basque has no known language family; most people who study this language theorize that it was spoken at the same time as Latin was flourishing throughout Europe! Image Credit: Zorion, via Wikimedia Commons .  License availabl...