UEFA Nations League

This September, a new international competition was launched on the European football scene: The UEFA Nations Cup. The championship was created with the aim of determining which team is the best among the 55 European football federations participating.

Former UEFA president, Michel Platini had the opinion that friendly international matches alone were not enough for the public, so he designed a new calendar for national football teams: the former uneven friendly matches are now substituted by top-world clashes between classic giants. Thus, in the first round we will see matches like Germany vs France or England vs Spain which sure will arise the expectation of the masses.

International events like this one help us to appreciate the cultural and linguistic diversity of the old continent. With a population of more than 700 million people divided in more than 50 countries, Europe concentrates around 200 languages, written most of them in three alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek. According to their origin, European languages can also be categorized as Germanic (German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian), Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and others), Slavic (like Russian, Czech, Croatian or Polish), Uralic (Finnish and Estonian mainly), or Turkic (Turkish).

Such variety of languages is regulated by the European Union, recognizing up to 24 languages as official, while at the same time funding plans to promote language learning and linguistic heterogeneity across Europe.

As a fun fact, English is the most understood language by European people, although German remains as the most widely spread mother tongue, with 95 million native speakers.

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