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Summary

Wikibooks.org is a community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. The Wikibook's Languages of Europe category can serve, for the language learner, educator and enthusiast, as an enormous doorway into the many European languages, both living and historical.

The European subcontinent has birthed and/or attracted an enormous variety of languages from many sub-branches of what linguists call the Indo-European languages.

Below you'll find direct links to a wide variety of European language open-content textbooks. These are free and open source, for everyone to use and benefit from. And collaborate on - especially language educators who have the knowledge to share with all through this open medium.

To boot, Wikibooks.org itself is available in a wide range of world languages!

From Wikibooks.org

Wikibooks Category: Languages of Europe

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

These language books concern Languages of Europe. See also Subject:Languages of Europe.

European Languages with Books or Pages

Albanian, Aragonese, Armenian, Austrian, Basque, Belarusian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chechen, Croatian, Danish, Galician, Gothic, Greenlandic, High Icelandic, Hungarian, Høgnorsk, Icelandic, Insubric, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Leonese, Lowland Scots, Macedonian, Manx, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Old Church Slavonic, Polish, Provençal, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovene, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh

This may be incomplete when you read this. Please check the Languages of Europe page for the latest content.

European Language Wikibooks Subcategories

Dutch language
English language
Finnish language
French language
German language
Greek language
Latin language
Lithuanian language
Portuguese language
Scottish Gaelic language
Spanish language
Yiddish language

Visit Wikibooks.org on Languages of Europe.
Wikipedia.org also has a category on Languages of Europe.

Summary

The now-ubiquitious Wikipedia.org has some multilingual gems tucked away in its folds. This article serves to point out one of the most powerful polyglot culture feaures that Wikipedia offers: the myriad articles in a multitude of languages at a single click away.

For instance, while browsing the topic "Language" on Wikipedia in English, down the left navigation bar you will find entries for the same topic in dozens of languages.

Summary

Wikibooks is a great idea. Like Wikipedia, Wikibooks consists of content that is public domain, which means that anything you find there is reusable in any fashion you like. This means it is truly Free and Open for learning and teaching.

Currently the Polish Language Wikibook consists of a basic course for learning Polish covering pronunciation, nouns, genders, adjectives, question words and more.

As always with Wikimedia projects, you are free to improve on the information created by fellow humans!

From Website

The Polish language is a member of the Western Slavic group of the Indo-European family of languages. It is easiest to learn if one already knows some other related language.

The most closely related are other Western Slavic languages: Czech, Slovak, Kashubian and Sorbian. More distant are the Southern and Eastern Slavic languages like Russian, Ukrainian, and Serbo-Croatian. Even further, but still somewhat similar are the Baltic languages: Latvian and Lithuanian. Polish is spoken by a total of approximately 40 million people, making it the second most widely spoken Slavic language in the world, next to Russian, and whose influence is almost up to par with her bigger sister. Other Slavs, especially the Bulgars (who consider Polish the most popular third language there) understand Polish and can pick it up with not much effort.

Someone who doesn't speak any Slavic language, but speaks some other Indo-European language, may still find many similarities between Polish grammar and the grammar of that language as well as many similar words.

Learning Polish is very difficult for those who don't know any Indo-European language well, especially for those who speak only Chinese, Japanese, or Korean... but as long as you are committed to learning Polish it is possible. If you are familiar with any other Slavic language (i.e Russian), then you have an advantage as this group share very similiar grammatical structures as well as a common history among them from their rise as well-organised centralised kingdoms in the Middle Ages to the Communist era.
This Wikibook is designed for anyone who wants to learn the basics of the Polish language. It is suitable for beginners and those who've been learning the language for a few years. Polish is written with a particularly unique version of the Latin alphabet.

Visit the Polish Language Wikibook.

Summary

Wikipedia's Simple English Free Encyclopedia is an interesting concept that has actually created quite a following. The idea behind the wiki is to collectively create a free and open encyclopedia with articles that can be read by people with only a basic knowledge of English, and to help them learn and improve while discovering new topics.

I would recommend the Simple English Wikipedia for folks interested in learning about topics that intrigue them while simultaneously learning English. I enjoy this method because it is more meaningful to me than random texts that might not interest students, or have little information pertinent to what they are motivated to read about. Keep 'em interested!

When combined with the wonders of Wiktionary English, there is a lot of educational material and practice content to work with on Simple English Wikipedia. Enjoy!

From Website

About Us

This is Simple English Wikipedia. Wikipedias are places where many people work together to make encyclopedias in many languages. We only use very simple English words and simple ways of writing here.

There are tens of thousands of articles in this wiki. All of the pages are free to use. There is a discussion in the GNU Free Documentation License.

You are invited to help! You may change these pages and make new pages. Read the help pages and other good pages to learn how to write pages here. If you need help, you may ask questions at Simple talk.

What to Do

Use easy words and shorter sentences. This lets people with little English read them.

Write good pages, with care. The best encyclopedia pages have useful information. They are also carefully written.

Use the pages to learn and teach. These pages can help people learn English. You can also use them to make a new Wikipedia to help other people, if you change the words to your own language.

Visit Simple English Wikipedia.

Part of the content for this article is adapted from an article on Freestyle Language. If you are interested in reading about language bits and bobs that are "freestyle" in nature, have a look.

Summary

This Wikipedia article can help those out there lost in what I refer to as TOEFL Salad, meaning the many and varied acronyms for learning and teaching the English language. That includes ESL, EFL, TESL, TEFL, TESOL, ESOL, ESD, EAP, EOL... you get the point.

Of course, the article also does a lot more than that, delving into English learning and instruction in English- and non-English-speaking countries, differences between spoken and written English, systems of simplified English, the many varities of English and more.

From Website

ESL (English as a second language), ESOL (English for speakers of other languages), and EFL (English as a foreign language) all refer to the use or study of English by speakers with a different native language. The precise usage, including the different use of the terms ESL and ESOL in different countries, is described below. These terms are most commonly used in relation to teaching and learning English, but they may also be used in relation to demographic information.

ELT (English language teaching) is a widely-used teacher-centred term, as in the English language teaching divisions of large publishing houses, ELT training, etc. The abbreviations TESL (teaching English as a second language), TESOL (teaching English for speakers of other languages) and TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) are all also used.

Other terms used in this field include EAL (English as an additional language), ESD (English as a second dialect), EIL (English as an international language), ELF (English as a lingua franca), ESP (English for special purposes, or English for specific purposes), EAP (English for academic purposes). Some terms that refer to those who are learning English are ELL (English language learner) and LEP (limited English proficiency).

Read the Wikipedia article on English Language Learning and Teaching.