Influence of number of speakers

There are many shells while the regional language may claim greater numbers of speakers than certain languages which happen to become official languages of sovereign states. For instance, Catalan (a regional language of Spain and France, albeit official in Andorra) has more speakers than Finnish or Danish. Cantonese has more than 60 million local & overseas speakers, as a regional language of Guangdong.

Relationship with official languages

Within the few subjects, a regional language can be closely related the state's independent language or even official language. E.g.: Walloon, a regional language of France & Belgium, belongs to the same personal of Oïl languages as French; Scots, a regional language of the United Kingdom, belongs to the same personal of West Germanic languages as English. Frisian, a regional language of The Netherlands and Germany, belongs to the same language personal when Dutch and German Võro, a regional language of Estonia, belongs to the same personal of Finno-Ugric languages as Estonian. Cantonese, a regional language of Guangdong, China, belongs to the same personal of Chinese languages as Mandarin, and shared a equivalent ideograms and writing systems.

Around more legal actions, a regional language can be super different from either the state's independent language or even official language. For instance:

Basque, a regional language within Spain, is non-Indo-European, and so unrelated to Spanish, a Romance language; Sorbian, a regional language of Germany, occurs as Slavic language, and so lone distantly related to German, the Germanic language.

Official languages as regional languages

An official language of the state might besides become spoken as the regional language within the region of a neighboring state. E.g.: German occurs as regional language of Italy; Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language, is a regional language of Romania whose official language, Romanian is a Romance language. Cantonese is de facto official language of Hong Kong, Macao and the province of Guangdong. Catalan, the official language of Andorra, is a regional language within Spain, France and Italy.