8 Languages That are Similar to English

We explored the languages that are most difficult for English speakers to learn in another blog post, but what about the languages that are the most similar to English?

Here are five (plus three) that are this close (per the thumbnail)—plus a bit of history on each one, and a comparison of a single text that's been translated into each one.

Alas:

What does it mean for two languages to be "close", anyway?

Before we get into the meat of this post, you should know that languages are not unlike living organisms:

Like family members, closely related languages share a number of characteristics: vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, idioms, culture, and so forth.

You can see this illustrated below, in an awesome illustration from the Finnish cartoonist Minna Sundberg:

As you can see on the right half of the image there, Old English came from Proto-Germanic, an "ancestor" language that branched off in three directions over the course of 500 BC to 500 AD:

Suffice it to say that, like a growing person, English had a complex story. You can read about it in brief in this blog post or in depth in the book "Our Magnificient Bastard Tongue" by linguist John McWhorter. Notably, in 1066, England was conquered by The Normans, which led the language to be heavily influenced by an entirely unrelated language—Old French.

The bulk of this blog post will look at English's relation with some of its closest living relatives. So you can appreciate that similarity, we'll conclude each section by looking at a few lines from the Gospel of Matthew, which was the only freely accessible text I could find available in each language.

Here it is for English:

Scots, a "sister language" so similar to English some consider it a dialect

Scots is a language spoken in Scotland, and the first point we need to make is that it's not the same as Scottish Gaelic (a Celtic language native to Scotland) or Scottish English (English with Scots-influenced pronunciation).

Here's an overview of its history:

The story of Scots is complex in a beautiful way, but here's the Sparknotes of the Sparknotes:

In other words, Scots and English are so similar because they descended from the same language, were spoken in very close proximity, and thus shared many linguistic influences.

In fact, Scots and English are so similar that 64% of Scottish people agree strongly or slightly that "Scots isn't a separate language (from English), but rather just a way of speaking English." (Some more information in Scotland's Census 2021, notably page 72).

Suffice it to say that the two languages are similar enough that you can probably understand the majority of this Biblical excerpt in Scots, even if you've never studied it before:

Frisian, a close "cousin" to the English language that's still spoken today

Scots and English represent the "Anglo" portion of the Anglo-Frisian language family, which naturally leaves Frisian. Today, about 400,000 people in Denmark and the northern region of the Netherlands and Germany speak a Frisian language.

If you'll do me a favor and imagine a cinematic "zooming out" sequence, our family tree looks like this:

So if Scots is like a sister to English, contained within the same nuclear family, then Frisian might be something like a cousin—close enough to be related by blood, but blood that's no longer from the same generation nor contained within the same household. (Historically speaking, while both are within the Anglo-Frisian family, English was heavily influenced by French, whereas West Frisian was heavily influenced by Dutch.)

This additional degree of separation proves significant. For example, while West Frisian is still quite parsable if you have an English translation to compare against:

North Frisian, to me at least, is completely incomprehensible—though I do notice a number of shared words when I look closely, such as "Moder" (mother), "hellig Geist" (Holy Ghost), "Man" (man), "seen" (son), and "Wârld" (world).

Dutch, the closest major language to English

Dutch is the language of the Netherlands, and you might think of it as having kicked Frisian out of The Frisian Kingdom (which included portions of what is now the Netherlands, Northern Germany, and Belgium). For our English-centric purposes, Dutch represents one further step away from the Anglic roots above: English/Scots and Frisian are on one side of the West Germanic family tree, while Dutch and High/Low German are on the other.

Importantly, Frisian, Dutch and High German were in a dialect continuum, meaning that a group of related languages was spoken in area, and languages that were close to each other were more intelligible while languages that were further from each other were less intelligible.

You can see these continuums represented in color in this wonderful graphic from Muturzikin (zoomable version without my chicken scratch):

If your geography skills aren't so strong, the main thing to take from this is that:

While Modern English and Dutch are different enough that I doubt you'll understand anything at all from the below text extract, you'll quickly notice similarities in grammatical structure and syntax if you decide to study Dutch:

Armed with this knowledge, take a stab at the below text. As a hint, "Dit is het" means "this is the...":

German, a related language that's distant enough to present language learning challenges

And now we arrive to a perplexing aspect of English's story: if we're a Germanic language that descended from proto-Germanic, then why does German look and sound like nonsense?

Let's get into it.

The first thing you need to know is that England was a Roman province for about 500 years—and then, as the Roman empire was collapsing in the 5th century, other people began showing up. In particular, the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons showed up. What exactly went down is a bit of a mystery, but two things are clear:

The Anglic- and Germanic-speaking populations mixed... but there's an important catch:

Remember the concept of a dialect continuum that we talked about above? How languages that are in close contact with each other tend to influence each other?

Well, when the Anglo-Saxons migrated out of continental Europe and into the island known then as Provincia Romania, they ended up placing the North Sea between themselves and the rest of the Germanic-speaking world. The languages began growing apart as a result—and, not only this, Old English would go on to receive influence from Old Norse (via viking invasions), Old French (as we'll discuss in the next section), Celtic languages (native to the area), Scots (which was located just North) and others.

The result is that, over the last 1,500 years, English and German have gone in pretty separate directions. Of particular note, Old English became significantly simplified, with its grammatical cases disappearing by the time Middle English arrived in ~1,100 AD, whereas German still has them today. While behind the scope of this article, this is basically to say that German articles and adjectives change forms depending on the role the noun they're attached to is playing in a sentence.

French, a Romance language from which English borrowed nearly a third of its vocabulary

Now it's time for the curveball.

Our ancestors did swimmingly with their decidedly Germanic language for about 500 years—and then, in 1066, the Norman French conquered England. En suite (see what I did there?), Old French became the language of the elite.

English was never the same.

To this day, if you take a gander at data on lexical similarity, you'll see that roughly a quarter of English vocab words are somehow similar in form or meaning to a French one. (For contrast, English and German have a lexical similarity of 60%—and, and as a fun fact, Afrikaans has 90-95% lexical similarity with Dutch).

What this means for learners is that while English and French aren't related—they're entirely separate languages—they share many words, phrases, and idioms. Perhaps it would be apt to say that French was something like an influential stepparent during English's teenage years.

A few notable examples of shared language (called "cognates"):

A particular favorite of mine is "C’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron" (It is by forging that one becomes a blacksmith), the French version of "practice makes perfect"—or, perhaps, the original version of "practice makes perfect" that we horribly butchered.

Bonus: North Germanic, the language family closest to English

If you peek at that Language Tree up in the top of the article and follow the branch back from English to West Germanic and Germanic, you'll see that the Germanic branch actually splits off in another direction: North Germanic, which gave way to the Nordic languages of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish.

I won't go into detail here, as we're now in "our great great great great grandparents were married" territory, but just for fun, I've copied out translations of that same text extract just so you can see how much (or little) we have with these relatives.

A big part of the reason these languages will look so foreign to you is, again, geography—as you can see, there's a sea separating most of these languages (Danish, shown in Purple, aside) from both Germany and England. This meant less contact between speakers of West and North Germanic languages. While these languages may have been somewhat similar 2,000 years ago, or at least shared a common ancestor in Proto-Germanic, they're no longer mutually intelligible.

Norwegian (bokmål)

Norwegian, as you might expect, is the language spoken in Norway. It looks like this:

Danish

Danish is the language of Denmark, and it looks like this:

Swedish

Last but not least, Swedish (surprise surprise) is spoken in Sweden. It looks like this:

How to learn a language (even if it isn't one of the closest languages to English)

Common roots and centuries of interaction mean that the above languages will be some of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn.

... but that doesn't mean you're out of luck if the language you want to learn isn't one of these "easy" languages, or if you do want to learn one of these languages but you aren't a native speaker of English.

The language learning industry has unfortunately fallen victim to a lot of marketing shenanigans, but when you brush that to the side, it's really pretty simple: just spend time interacting with it.

Say you're wacthing YouTube in Japanese:

And you see a Japanese mother holding her baby, saying 愛(あい)しているよ​ (aisiteru yo!)

. Bam! You can latch right onto that. Aishiteru yo! means "I love you!"

... but then maybe you're watching a drama, and you notice that people also use the word 好(す)き​ (suki)

...

And they also tend to use a phrase like 大好(だいす)き​ (daisuki)

〜​のことが​大好​き​ (~ no koto ga daisuki) to talk about things they love, as opposed to aishiteruyo!, which is more commonly reserved for people they are very intimately close with.

That's really quite a lot of nuance—and all you had to do to pick up on it was just consume media that you enjoyed.

Which is to say...

The #1 thing you need to know if you want to learn another language

Whether you want to learn a "familiar" language like German, a "distant" one like Japanese, or anything in between—know that you don't need a fancy course or some polyglot's Super Secret™ method.

All you have to do is make a habit of interacting with that language.

To turn that into a slogan:

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the easiest language to learn is the one that excites you—the one that you feel excited about spending time with.

Migaku, at its core, is pretty straightforward—we give make text in webpages and subtitles interactive so that you can consume (and understanding) media in the language you want to learn—even if you're not very good at it yet.

You can try it totally free for ten days 💪

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And now for that side-by-side comparison I mentioned: