LANGUAGE MAP OF EUROPE. (a) The Romance Languages.—Portmgal is about the only country in Europe that has no lan guage question, because only one language, Portuguese, is spoken in it. In the 12th cen tury the Galician (Gallego) dialect of Spanish, to which it is closely related, and which is still in the northwest of Spain, was used by Spanish and Portuguese poets alike. Outside of Portugal, Portuguese is spoken in the Azores, the islands of Madeira and Saint Thomas, in the Portuguese colonies of India and Africa, and is the official language of Brazil. Spain is less fortunate. Although the greater part of the people speak dialects more or less closely related to the Castilian of the centre, which is the official language, namely Aragonese in the northeast, Asturian in the north, Leonese and Andalusian in the south, yet the Galician is more nearly Portuguese, and the Catalonian of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands must be considered, and is so claimed by the natives, a distinct language, which is more closely related to the Provencal of the south of France. Besides, the Basque of the provinces of Guipuscoa and Biscay, and part of Navarre and Alava, is not even an Indo-European language, but a remainder of the ancient Iberian tongue of the peninsula. Outside of Spain, Spanish is spoken in South and Central America, in Mexico and some Southern States of the United States, in the Philippines, the Canaries, the Carolines, while Catalan is spoken in the southwest of France, to the east of Perpignan, in Cuba and in the Argentine Republic.
Except for a spur of the Basque in the Basses Pyrenees, the Catalan at Perpignan, the Celtic Breton sporadically still spoken at Finistere, Cotes-du-Nord, and the Morbihan, and a Flemish border in the northeast, the rest of France is divided up between the French and the Provencal dialects of the Romance family. The Romance line in the north runs from Gravelines through Merville, Steenwerck and Nieppe, then follows the Lys and passes into Belgium. The linguistic line
in Belgium runs approximately along the West Flanders and Hainaut borders, enters Brabant and runs to Longuey, where the line turns to the east and follows the Luxemburg frontier. It takes in Metz, Sarrebourg in Lorraine and a part of Alsace, and from Munster follows the border up to Switzerland, where it cuts the cantons of Soleure and Berne, goes to Lake Brienne, follows Lake Morat, goes through canton Freibur and over Mount la Berra, then runs throw the southern part of Berne and the Col u Valais, follows the Italian frontier up to Savoy, runs along the Piedmont, and goes as far as Menton.
In the departments of Haute-Garonne, i Ariege, Gironde, the Gascon is spoken, which is now generally considered to be a separate language, rather than a dialect, that stands in the same relation to the Provencal that Portu guese occupies in regard to Spanish. The rest of the French territory consists of the Longue d'oeil, which contains the official French, and the Langue d'oc, to which the Provencal dialects belong. It is not possible to run a well-defined hne between the two, but ap proximately an irregular line, which runs east of Angouleme, south of Montlucon and Lyons, and north of Geneva, almost to Bern, is the southern limit of the French dialects. Besides, the southeastern dialects, which include those spoken in Switzerland, in Savoy and in a part of the Franche-Comte, are mixed, and gen erally go under the name of Gallo-Roman. The official language of France is the one which evolved out of the dialect of the Isle-de France. With the growth of the French colonies it also spread in America to Canada, where some 3,000,000 speak a peculiar patois, in Louisiana, in the western part of San Domingo, at Dominique, in some of the An tilles and in French Guinea. In Africa it is spoken in Algiers, Madagascar and, besides, in• the smaller French colonies, both in Africa and in Asia.