The closest living language to English is Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken in the Netherlands and Germany, sharing significant vocabulary, grammar, and structure with Old English, though modern forms have diverged; Scots, often considered a dialect, is also extremely close, while Dutch and German are major Germanic relatives with strong lexical connections.
Dutch is the closest major language to English
With 22 million native speakers and an additional six million who speak it as a second language, Dutch is the third most widely spoken Germanic language in the world (after English and German).
English, broadly speaking has German vocabulary and grammar with some additions of vocabulary from French via Latin, ancient Greek and Norse and just about any other language that hung around long enough for it to chase down dark alleys, hit over the head, and go through its pockets for.
Scots, a "sister language" so similar to English some consider it a dialect. Frisian, a close "cousin" to the English language that's still spoken today. Dutch, the closest major language to English. German, a related language that's distant enough to present language learning challenges.
English is a hodge-podge language that pulls from many others, so you'll find cognates (words that sound and look similar in two languages) in both. German wins with the number of similarities, though—it shares over half of its words with English!
Top 10 Easiest Languages for English Speakers to Learn
The first people to call themselves English were predominantly descended from northern Europeans, a new study reveals. Over 400 years of mass migration from the northern Netherlands and Germany, as well as southern Scandinavia, provide the genetic basis of many English residents today.
UNESCO is giving credit where credit is due: Chinese is officially the most difficult language in the world.
Italian is one of the closest languages to French, sharing a large number of cognates--that is, words from the same Latin root. Below are some tips for learning Italian if you already speak some French...also check out Jennifer's Indo-European Languages French and Italian Comparative Tutorial.
Here are some pretty similar pairs:
Having emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who settled in Britain in the 5th century ce, English today is a constantly changing language that has been influenced by a plethora of different cultures and languages, such as Latin, French, Dutch, and Afrikaans.
Siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig (seven hundred and seventy-seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-seven) Talk about your lucky sevens! This massive, 65-letter word is the number 777,777 in German.
Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, with its closest relatives being Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is very different from Modern English and Modern Scots, and largely incomprehensible for Modern English or Modern Scots speakers without study.
Here's the spoiler: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Hindi are the top 10 most useful languages to learn in today's globalized world.
The Closest Major Language To English: Dutch
Like Frisian and English, Dutch is another West Germanic language that developed from Proto-Germanic. Because of this, Dutch possesses many words and phrases similar to English and has a similar grammatical structure.
Spanish may be the #1 easiest language to learn. Not only does Spanish share the same alphabet – with the sole addition of ñ – but it's also phonetic. That makes figuring out new vocabulary easy, since the spelling tells you how to pronounce it.
Do Italians understand Spanish? Surprisingly, yes! It is entirely possible for an Italian speaker to understand Spanish, but each person needs to adapt, speak slowly, and sometimes change their vocabulary. Spanish and Italian are two languages that are very close in terms of vocabulary and grammar.
In essence, however, it suggests that 80% of what you put into practise in your conversations and in your reading and writing will come from just 20% of what you revise. In other words, if you spend five hours studying French, it's likely that only one hour of that time will bear results that you can put to use.
According to Ethnologue, English is the most spoken language in the world, including native and non-native speakers. Like Latin or Greek at the time, English has become the world's common language. It is the default language in international business, tourism, technology, and much more.
– though it is certainly different from English grammar. However, studies have shown that Japanese is the single language that takes English people the longest to learn.
Generally speaking, Japanese is more difficult than Chinese when it comes to grammar. Mandarin Chinese is an analytical language, like English, and each word has only one form, no matter how it's being used in a sentence. It's also a subject-verb-object language, like English.
They estimated that the ancestry of the present-day English ranges between 25% and 47% Continental North European (similar to historical northern Germans and Danish), 11% to 57% similar to the British Late Iron Age, and 14% to 43% IA-like (similar to France, Belgium and neighbouring parts of Germany).
Historians and linguists generally agree that Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian are the oldest languages with a clear written record. All three are extinct, meaning they are no longer used and do not have any living descendants that can carry the language to the next generation.
During the subsequent Viking Age, seafaring North Germanic adventurers, commonly referred to as Vikings, raided and settled territories throughout Europe and beyond, founding several important political entities and exploring the North Atlantic as far as North America.