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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