Sprachraum

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Sprachraum (English-natural plural: Sprachraums, German plural Sprachräume) 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 area". 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).