European languages are dialects of each other?

[nq:1]I'm an Asian. I've heard people say that European languages are much like members of a single family, and people there learn other languages without much difficulty. Do the languages come so close to one another?[/nq]
Yes, so far as (1) they have common
roots, usually in Latin or Teutonic languages,
(2) they share common features, e.g. gender,
case, definite or indefinite art

Not true if you mean these languages are close to mutually understandable. Some like Polish and Russian are close to being mutually understandable. Others like German and French are not.
Most European languages are closely related and are called Indo-European or Aryan languages (and in that regard are related to some non-European languages such as Sanskrit.)
Other languages, such as Estoni

[nq:1]I'm an Asian. I've heard people say that European languages are much like members of a single family, and people there learn other languages without much difficulty. Do the languages come so close to one another? Regent[/nq]
There's a somewhat superficial page that discusses most of the interesting Indo-European languages at

[nq:1]I'm an Asian. I've heard people say that European languages are much like members of a single family, and people there learn other languages without much difficulty. Do the languages come so close to one another?[/nq]
Yes and no. Most of the languages in Europe (at least ignoring recent immigration) are members of the same language family, called Indo-European by linguists. As the "Indo"

[nq:2]I'm an Asian. I've heard people say that European languages ... Do the languages come so close to one another? Regent[/nq]
[nq:1]There's a somewhat superficial page that discusses most of the interesting Indo-European languages at http://www.ielanguages.com/eurolang.html. With the exception of Finnish,

[nq:1] With the exception of Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and Basque, all European languages are of this Indo-European family. [/nq]
And Maltese.
\\P. Schultz

[nq:2] With the exception of Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and Basque, all European languages are of this Indo-European family. [/nq]
[nq:1]And Maltese.[/nq]
How could we have forgotten?

Charles Riggs
My email address: chriggs/at/eircom/dot/net

[nq:1]Not true if you mean these languages are close to mutually understandable. Some like Polish and Russian are close to ... are related to some non-European languages such as Sanskrit.) Other languages, such as Estonian and Finnish are completely different and[/nq]
they are Uralic which also includes Hungarian.
other uralic languages are spoken in European Russia and Siberia, not Centra

[nq:1]I'm an Asian. I've heard people say that European languages are much like members of a single family, and people there learn other languages without much difficulty. Do the languages come so close to one another?[/nq]
the short answer: NO.
OTOH cultural borrowings among the langauges of europe are common.

[nq:2]I'm an Asian. I've heard people say that European languages ... difficulty. Do the languages come so close to one another?[/nq]
[nq:1]Yes and no. Most of the languages in Europe (at least ignoring recent immigration) are members of the same language family, called Indo-European by linguists. As the "Indo" implies, this includes non-European languages, primarily Farsi (Persian), from Iran