Sacre bleu! The language that English speakers appear to find the chicest is not actually our closest relative! That said, linguists have found that English and French are 27% lexical similar, and there are many words of French origin that English speakers use every day. These Vikings brought their language, Old Norse, along with them during their pillaging, and a sizable amount of Norse vocabulary ended up in modern English. So besides the same language family background as the previous languages, what makes English so similar to Norwegian? Well, from the 8th to the 11th centuries, the British Isles experienced countless Viking invasions. Don’t get too excited though, because Norwegian is still a Germanic language - it’s just a Northern Germanic language. This is why English and German share a great deal of vocabulary.įor an example of just how much vocabulary Germanic languages share, take a look at a couple of examples between German, Dutch and English: GermanĪll of this overlap in pronunciation and meaning means that despite German’s complicated grammar, English and German are still considered 60% lexically similar.įor the next closest language to English on our list, we finally have a language that’s not from the West Germanic family: Norwegian. Close Language: GermanĪnyone who’s tried learning German can attest that it’s a pretty difficult language to learn, but like all the previous languages on this list, it descended from the same root language: Proto-Germanic. As a bonus, English is also quite similar to Afrikaans, a South African language that’s based on Dutch but includes more indigenous vocabulary. It’s no wonder then that Dutch considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn - and that Dutch speakers are typically the most fluent non-native English speakers around. It’s easy to see how the grammatical structure mimics what comes naturally to English speakers. Take a look at the Dutch phrase: “ Ik heb een probleem.” It translates directly to “I have a problem,” in English - and you probably figured that out anyway based on how similar they are. Because of this, Dutch possesses many words and phrases similar to English and has a similar grammatical structure.
Like Frisian and English, Dutch is another West Germanic language that developed from Proto-Germanic. Speaking of Dutch, the next closest relative on our list is none other than this lowlands language. Starting around 1500, Dutch became the official language of the region and Frisian has been in decline since then. The Kingdom of Frisia was an independent territory for several hundred years until bad flooding crippled the population. While there are only around 480,000 Frisian native speakers today, Frisian was a popular language in the middle ages. Take a look at how its dialects compare with English: English It’s a West Germanic language that shares 80% lexical similarity with English. Frisian is a group of three languages spoken in parts of the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. If you’re looking for the closest relative to English that is definitely a distinct language, the answer is Frisian. Closest (Definitely Distinct) Language: Frisian In spite of that, Scots has not disappeared but remains a vital part of Scottish identity. From here, English became the language of government and religion, and slowly also overtook common speech. Because of the political divide, Scots was the primary language of Scotland until the union of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. We can definitively say that English and Scots are very similar because they both developed from Old English (Anglo-Saxon). (It’s trickier than you would have thought, right?)
In fact, according to a 2010 study by the Scottish government, 64% of Scottish citizens don’t consider it a distinct language.īefore we discard Scots entirely from the top of our list, it’s worth seeing for yourself if you think Scots is mutually intelligible with English. We say arguably as the language is often regarded more as a dialect of English than an actual language. The closest language to English is arguably Scots. However, figuring out which language is closest is a little more complicated than you might think.
It would be easy to think that English is closest to French, because of all the shared vocabulary, or German, since English is a Germanic language. Part of this is to blame on English’s complicated history - but i t’s also a greedy language that likes to pluck words from other languages to use as its own.Īll of these factors make it difficult to determine the languages closest to English. It rejects its own rules, makes exceptions for others and still experiences a great deal of infighting (looking at you, Oxford comma).
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