Sprachraum
Sprachraum (plural:
Sprachraums, or
Sprachräume in German) is a
linguistics term used to designate a geographical area where a language, dialect, group or family of languages is spoken. The
German word
Sprachraum literally means "language space". An alternate English term would be
glottosphere.
A Sprachraum does not necessarily follow national
borders. For example, most of
South America is part of the Spanish Sprachraum, while a single, small country like
Switzerland is at the intersection of four such language spheres. A Sprachraum can also be separated by oceans. The English Sprachraum (
Anglosphere) spans the globe, from the
United Kingdom,
United States,
Canada,
Ireland,
Australia, and
New Zealand, not to mention the many former British colonies where English has official language status alongside local languages, such as in
India and
South Africa. The French Sprachraum, which also spans several
continents, is known as
La Francophonie. The Francophonie is also the name of an international organisation composed of countries with French as an official language.
By extension, a Sprachraum can also include a group of related languages. Thus the
Scandinavian Sprachraum includes
Norway,
Sweden,
Denmark,
Iceland,
Finland (
Finland-Swedish), and
the Faroe Islands or the Finnic Sprachraum is
Finland,
Estonia and adjacent areas of
Scandinavia and
Russia.
Even within a single language, there can be different
Sprachraums, otherwise known as
dialect continua. A classic example is the dialects of
Chinese, which are often mutually unintelligible in spoken form, but have a unified non-phonetic writing system.
Arabic has a similar situation, but its writing system is partially phonetic (a so-called
abjad).
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Anglosphere (the
Anglophone world)
*
Francophonie (the
Francophone world)
*
Lusofonia (the
Lusophone world)
*
Sinosphere*
Arab World *
Dutch Language Union*
Commonwealth of Independent States (more or less coterminous with the realm of the
Russian language)
La Raza (the
Hispanophone world)
*
Malay world*
Latin Europe
