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army1987 comments on Worth remembering (when comparing ‘the US’ to ‘Europe’) - Less Wrong
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The map of languages of Europe (as most such maps I've seen) has some very weird things. Why the hell would “Toscan” [sic] be considered a separate language from Italian and Neapolitan wouldn't? Describing most of Ireland as a “bilinguism [sic] situation” sounds like wishful thinking -- Irish might be official but very few people speak it regularly (not counting school classes and the like) except on the west coast.
Being from southern Sweden myself, I was also quite amused to see that Scanian – which is really just an accent – is marked as a separate language.
The difference between languages and accents is largely a manner of degree. The boundary lines are completely arbitrary. You can pair mutually intelligible modes of speech together in a chain and have non-mutually-intelligible ends of the chain.
Indeed, my point was rather that if Scanian is included, so should ten or so other accents as well.
I live in Ireland. Ireland is definitely not a bilingual country.
Most Irishmen at least know a little Gaelic as they have to learn it at school. The map has worse inaccuracies. Occitan and Low German aren't even official and are spoken by tiny minorities, contrary to the impression one could easily get from the map. Ingrian is effectively dead with 500 speakers according to Wikipedia. The Czech-German bilingual area in western Bohemia is completely made up (it even doesn't correspond to the pre-WWII German speaking area). The Hungarian speaking area in Romania should be centered a bit more to the north-west. Breton isn't and never wasn't spoken in the pink-dotted locations. There is a German minority in Polish Silesia, but again the area should be smaller.
Not speaking about the language names and their spelling which reveal French origins of the map.
Yeah, and most of them, a few years out of school, can hardly remember enough of it to understand a weather forecast. By that standard, most of northern Europe should be marked as bilingual with English.
)Anyway, I was just exemplifying. That map, as most similar maps, is pretty much atrocious. I suggest reaching your wallet to see if it's still there¹ whenever you hear people talking about minority languages.)