See here. This gives the “lexical distance” between various European languages. What it gets right are the language groups, but the details are a little odd. For example, it seems hard to believe that Spanish and Basque, which aren’t a bit related, are closer than Hungarian and Estonian, which are somewhat related. Likewise, it says that Spanish and Basque are more related than Swedish and Finnish, which aren’t a bit related, either. Why then is the Spanish-Basque distance 70, while the Swedish-Finnish distance is 90? I’m also pretty sure that Spanish and Portuguese should be closer, except that there’s a slight problem with those two because I think it’s easier for Portuguese speakers to understand Spanish than vice versa.
Then there’s English. English isn’t close to much of anything, except Frysian, which we never hear. Listen to this video and see how well you do. I only picked up the words “and” and “that is.” I say this as an American with a Midwest accent. It seems that some people from Britain do a lot better, based on their accents. But then I have a hard time understanding those accents; in fact, our friends and I basically turn on the subtitles (if we can) when we watch British movies or television shows. So, not only are there no other languages that are close to English, English is so varied that some accents can be difficult to understand.
And finally, there are the slavic languages. A friend who was a native speaker of Polish was able to understand some Russian he heard on the television series The Big Bang Theory, simply from knowing Polish. Yet, the chart has Polish and Russian as more separated than English and German. I doubt if I would understand much of anything in German if I hadn’t studied it a bit. Anyway, my impression based on several sources is that the slavic languages are much closer than this chart suggests.
Anyone?
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