Stratum (linguistics) in the context of "Mixed language"

The Aromanian language (Aromanian: limba armãneascã, limba armãnã, armãneashti, armãneashte, armãneashci, armãneashce or limba rrãmãneascã, limba rrãmãnã, rrãmãneshti), also known as Vlach or Macedo-Romanian, is an Eastern Romance language, similar to Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian and Romanian, spoken in Southeastern Europe. Its speakers are called Aromanians or Vlachs (a broader term and an exonym in widespread use to define Romance communities in the Balkans).

Aromanian shares many features with modern Romanian, including similar morphology and syntax, as well as a large common vocabulary inherited from Latin. They are considered to have developed from Common Romanian, a common stage of all the Eastern Romance varieties. An important source of dissimilarity between Romanian and Aromanian is the adstratum languages (external influences); whereas Romanian has been influenced to a greater extent by the Slavic languages, Aromanian has been more influenced by Greek, with which it has been in close contact throughout its history.

The pre-Greek substrate (or substratum) consists of the unknown pre-Greek language or languages (either Pre-Indo-European or other Indo-European languages) spoken in prehistoric Greece prior to the emergence of the Proto-Greek language in the region c. 3200–2200 BC, during the Early Helladic period. About 1,000 words of Greek vocabulary cannot be adequately explained as derivatives from Proto-Greek or Proto-Indo-European, leading to the substratum hypothesis. According to scholars, Ancient Greek was likely influenced by two types of substrates: one Indo-European, probably an unknown Anatolian language that has been called "Parnassian", and one or several non-Indo-European languages that pre-date the coming of Greeks to the region.

Maltese (Maltese: Malti, also L-Ilsien Malti or Lingwa Maltija) is a Central Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance superstrata. It is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script. It is spoken by the Maltese people and is a national language of Malta, and is the only official Semitic and Afroasiatic language of the European Union. According to John L. Hayes, it descended from a North African dialect of Colloquial Arabic which was introduced to Malta when the Aghlabids captured it in 869/870 CE. It is also said to have descended from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianisation of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of Latinisation. It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. Maltese is thus classified separately from the 30 varieties constituting the modern Arabic macrolanguage. Maltese is also distinguished from Arabic and other Semitic languages since its morphology has been deeply influenced by Romance languages, namely Italian and Sicilian.

The original Arabic base comprises around one-third of the Maltese vocabulary, especially words that denote basic ideas and the function words, but about half of the vocabulary is derived from standard Italian and Sicilian; and English words make up between 6% and 20% of the vocabulary. A 2016 study shows that, in terms of basic everyday language, speakers of Maltese are able to understand less than a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic and Libyan Arabic, which are Maghrebi Arabic dialects related to Siculo-Arabic, whereas speakers of Tunisian Arabic and Libyan Arabic are able to understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese. This reported level of asymmetric intelligibility is considerably lower than the mutual intelligibility found between mainstream varieties of Arabic.

The Avestan period (c. 1500 – c. 400 BCE) is the period of Iranian history when the collection of canonical texts of Zoroastrianism called the Avesta was produced. The period saw important developments to religious thought and to Persian mythology and the tradition of epic poetry exemplified by the Shahnameh.

Scholars can reliably distinguish between two different linguistic strata in the Avesta labeled "Old Avestan" and "Young Avestan". These two strata represent two different stages in the development of the Avestan language and the society of its speakers. The Old Avestan society is the one to which Zoroaster and his immediate followers belonged. The Young Avestan society is less clearly delineated and reflects a longer time span.

The pre-Indo-European languages are any of several ancient languages, not necessarily related to one another, that existed in Prehistoric Europe, Asia Minor, Ancient Iran, and Southern Asia before the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages. The oldest Indo-European language texts are Hittite and date from the 19th century BC in Kültepe (modern eastern Turkey), and while estimates vary widely, the spoken Indo-European languages are believed to have developed at the latest by the 3rd millennium BC (see Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses). Thus, the pre-Indo-European languages must have developed earlier than or, in some cases, alongside the Indo-European languages that ultimately displaced and replaced almost all of them.

A handful of the pre-Indo-European languages are still extant: in Europe, Basque retains a localised strength, with fewer than a million native speakers, whereas the Dravidian languages remain very widespread in the Indian subcontinent, with over 250 million native speakers (the four major languages being Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam) and the Brahui that stretches into modern Iran. In the Caucasus, Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages and Kartvelian languages are still intact, with the first having the least language security of the three pre-Indo-European Caucasian language groups. Some pre-Indo-European languages are attested only as linguistic substrates in Indo-European languages or in toponyms. In much of Western Asia (including Iran and Anatolia), the pre-Indo-European, Hurrian/Caucasian, Semitic languages, Dravidian and language isolates have survived to the present day, although Elamite has entirely disappeared.

The Paleo-European languages (sometimes also called Old European languages) are the mostly unknown languages that were spoken in Neolithic (c. 7000 – c. 1700 BC) and Bronze Age Europe (c. 3200 – c. 600 BC) prior to the spread of the Indo-European and Uralic families of languages. The vast majority of modern European populations speak Indo-European languages. However, until the Bronze Age, non-Indo-European languages were predominant across the continent. The speakers of Paleo-European languages gradually assimilated into speech communities dominated by Indo-European speakers, leading to their eventual extinction, except for Basque, which remains the only surviving descendant of a Paleo-European language.

A related term, "Pre-Indo-European", refers more generally to the diverse languages that were spoken in Eurasia before the Indo-European migrations. This category thus includes certain Paleo-European languages (apart from those that were replaced by Uralic languages), along with many others from West, Central, and South Asia.

Sardinian or Sard is a Romance language spoken by the Sardinians on the Italian Mediterranean island of Sardinia.

The original character of the Sardinian language among the Romance languages has long been known among linguists. Many Romance linguists consider it, together with Italian, as the language that is the closest to Latin among all of Latin's descendants. However, it has also incorporated elements of Pre-Latin (mostly Paleo-Sardinian and, to a much lesser degree, Punic) substratum, as well as a Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Spanish, French, and Italian superstratum. These elements originate in the political history of Sardinia, whose indigenous society experienced competition and, at times, conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers.

Swiss French (French: français de Suisse or suisse romand) is the variety of French spoken in the French-speaking area of Switzerland known as Romandy. French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland, the others being German, Italian, and Romansch. In 2020 around 2 million people, or 22.8% of the population, in Switzerland spoke French as their primary language, and 28% of the population used French most often at work.

The French spoken in Switzerland is very similar to that of France or Belgium. The differences between the French of Switzerland and of France are most noticeably lexical, influenced by local substrate languages. While substantial phonological differences exist, as the French of Switzerland preserves many distinctions lost elsewhere, the phonetic qualities are often quite close, such as with the existence of long vowels or the distinction between /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/. This contrasts with the differences between Standard German and Swiss German, which are largely mutually unintelligible.