What language is closest to English?

American

 

Australian - although I'm not quite sure... :lol:

 

Canadian, I think.

 

"Well in America they haven't used it for years." Prof H. Higgins.

 

I doubt that the scandinavian languages are so close to English. Ok, so nowadays we all speak 'swenglish', but I think the influences from English, French and German are about equal, at least if comparing words. Finnish is a totally different language.

Didn't the Celtic culture have something to do with both Great Britain and France? (Revealing my ignorance here ).


/Paj

 

Hindi


Indians who know English often mingle it with Indian languages in their conversations.
English in India

. . . about 35 million people
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/india/hohen...enthal/5.2.html

 

Celtic influences on the English language are tiny compared to the Norman and Teutonic vocabularies that dominate, and most of them tend to be culturally or geographically specific to the Celtic regions (e.g. cwm, glen, loch). There are a few words that are identifiably Gaelic (e.g. galore, smashin, slogan); I'm less sure of Welsh/Cumbric and Cornish influences.

I don't know, but I expect, that Breton and other (extinct) Celtic languages have had less influence on French than the Celtic languages have on English. English is a great absorber of words - pick almost any modern language and you'll find it's given at least one word to English.

 

It's German. There's a saying that goes something like this: Half of the words in the English language derive from German; the other half derive from other languages.

 

Yiddish. (Oy!)

 

I'm amazed that I'm the first to suggest this, but I believe Spanish is the closest language to English. A very large number of words in both languages come from Latin, and are so nearly-identical in Spanish and English that whether written or spoken, there's no mistaking their meaning. Verb conjugation is more complex in Spanish, but neither language has noun declension.

Mark Twain said that a reasonably-educated person could learn Spanish in 30 weeks, English in 30 months, or German in 30 years. Clearly, he regarded Spanish as being closer to English than is English to the Germanic languages.

In college I studied Anglo-Saxon (Beowulf, The Seafarer, etc.) very briefly, and it was clearly much more difficult than Spanish, suggesting to me that the Germanic languages are much farther removed from English than is Spanish. -- And there is no doubt in my mind that Spanish is the easiest language for a native-English speaker to learn.

(I can still recite the first half-dozen or a dozen lines of Beowulf, though I've forgotten what they mean.)

 

In general, most of the "everyday" words in English come from Teutonic languages (German and Norwegian being the modern equivalents), and most of the "learned" words come from Romance languages (predominately French). The explanation for this is that in the period roughly AD600 to AD1000 (someone correct me with better dates, please), there was a lot of influence across the North Sea from the area that is now Germany, Denmark and Norway. These languages gained a foothold in England, either by population movement or by trade, displacing the previously dominant Celtic cultures. You can still hear the difference between the different source languages in the dialects of (say) Yorkshire, Newcastle and Aberdeen.

When the Normans conquered England in 1066, the linguistic change they brought was less pervasive than that brought by the Saxons and the Norse. In many cases, it was the (newly-installed) nobility who spoke Norman French, whilst their subjects continued to speak Anglo-Saxon, with a few Norman words adopted as necessary - but retaining the Germanic grammar. Particularly telling is the language of the butcher: the peasants grew animals and called them by their Saxon names - cows, pigs, sheep - whilst the aristocracy ate the meat and called it by Norman names - beef, pork, mutton. Most other languages use the same word for both.

The above is obviously an over-simplified picture of the evolution of our language. For example, it takes no account of the following "English" words (in no particular order):

bungalow, anorak, totem, algebra, bamboo, bikini, lagoon, chocolate, vodka, shampoo, alcohol, juggernaut, plaza, commando, racoon, tea, tobacco, polo, lychee, maize, barbecue, capsize, robot, budgerigar, paper, sauna, ukulele, gauze, sabre, tycoon, funky, raffia, atoll, gong, shark, toboggan, purple, marmalade, vampire, yo-yo, tattoo, hammock, taboo, cashew, tulip, banana, glitch, pariah

And if you know the source of all those without having to look them up, I'll be impressed!

 

Californian dude!
New Yorker "Whatsa madda for ya!"
Southern y'all
UP eh?

 

Algebra comes from Arabic. In Spanish, nearly all the words beginning with "al" come from Arabic. Algebra is identical in Spanish and English, though I don't know if it entered English directly from Spanish or via another route.

Robot comes from Czech (where it means worker) - All Issac Asimov fans know that one.

And I'm going to take a wild guess that chocolate comes from Nahuatl (Aztec) because of the vague similarity to some other Nahuatl food words, such as ejote (string beans) elote (corn-on-the-cob) and a wonderful word, guajolote (turkey).

 

For a fascinating book about the English language and its relationships to other languages, try:

The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way
by Bill Bryson

Not only is it informative, its also a bit humorous.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=books&n=507846

 

A Bit Of History

English started out as a germanic language. The major germanic branches can be thought of as:

• Eastern Germanic - root of modern German
• Western Germanic - root of modern English.
• Northern Germanic - root of Scandinavian languages (but not Finnish, the Finns have their own thing going on.)

English got a big shove away from its germanic roots when England was invaded and occupied by French speakers. A lot of French/Latin derived words got injected then.

Even after England was autonomous again, the language was, uh, somewhat lumpy. You had high or formal english, AKA the queens english. You had low or informal english in the form of Cockney. The Scots were up in the hills with their variety, the Irish were over on their own island (well it used to be their island) with another variety of English, and regions and small towns all over the place had thick local dialects going.

When Britannia ruled the waves they also started colonizing the world, or at least the parts they liked. Different colonies got people from different places. The colonists started out with whichever variety of english they had and sometimes linguistically wandered off, or other times stood still while British English evolved away from them.

If you look at the East coast of the US, all of the big old harbor towns have their own accents. This is because people who emigrated would tend to go to where they knew someone, so they tended to end up with people who spoke like they did. Thus you end up with the Dakota/Minnesota dialect which is scandinavian influenced. Boston English which is Irish influenced. I think of the east coast of Canada as having a faint Scotch influence, Australian sounds somewhat Cockney to me, etc.

Modern English is a very adventuresome language. It has loan words from languages that are totally unrelated to it. The spelling, pronunciation and grammar wander about with no adult supervision. We have different words with the same meaning, identical words with different meanings, multiple correct spellings, you name it, it's in there someplace.

Regarding most similar to English without actually being English, there are some small languages in the area around Belgium & Holland. They have Dutch/Flemish, and Frisian. There is something called Nederlunds (not sure if it is the same as Dutch.) My understanding is that Frisian is the closest living relative to English.