A linguistics expert chimes in on which languages are the most manageable for English speakers to master and shares her personal tips for successfully taking up a new tongue.
Whether you’re gearing up for a big trip or looking to stimulate your brain, attempting to learn a new language is always a noble endeavor. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. We turned to Hannah McElgunn, a Canadian linguist based at the University of Chicago, for the inside scoop on everything English speakers should keep in mind when choosing an adopted tongue.
“There are two ways that languages can be related to each other,” McElgunn explains. “One is through genealogical relation, when two languages descend from a common language historically. Another is through contact, or vocabulary borrowing.” English is a Germanic language, so its syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (how words are formed and relate to each other) will be similar to other languages from the same family, which includes many Scandinavian languages.
But while the majority of English vocabulary is inherited from Germanic speech, many English words actually have Latin roots. Modern languages that originate from Latin, such as French and Spanish, are known as Romance languages. Many of these official languages share cognates with English, or words with a common etymological origin. This explains why, for example, “when you hear someone speak in French, some words will sound like they do in English, just pronounced slightly different,” McElgunn says. (For example, the English word for “restaurant” translates in French to restaurant and in Spanish to restaurante.)
Which languages are most similar to English?
Germanic languages include German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish, and Afrikaans (in addition to English).
Romance languages include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian, all of which originate from the same parent language (Latin).
According to McElgunn, various languages within the above “families” are also closely related. “The reason people who speak French can understand some words in Spanish is because they’re in the same language family,” the linguist notes. “Likewise, if you already know Norwegian, you could probably learn Danish pretty quickly.”