What language is the closest to English?

Answer 1

There are three choices -- Scots, Frisian and Dutch. (I'd opt for Frisian)

It just depends on how you define "different language", and if you think if matters how many speakers the language has.

First,in case anyone tells you "American" that's nonsense -- American & British English are clearly dialects of one common language.

Others will say GERMAN -- a clear relative, but not the closest. The language we know as German is actually "High German", so-called because it is spoken in the inland, elevated areas (originally spoken in "Prussia", the eastern part of modern Germany, this was the language of Luther), whereas English is more closely related to the "Low German" languages of the lowlands closer to the sea.

So. . .
1) The first reasonable candidate is SCOTS, that is "Lowland Scots" or "Ulster Scots" (to distinguish it from the Gaelic language known as Highland Scots). Many, however, simply treat this is a dialect of English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language.

2) The next closest, and clearly a distinct language is FRISIAN, "spoken by about half a million members of an ethnic group living on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_language

3) If that's not a large enough group to count, you'd have to go with DUTCH. (Compare also Low German dialects in the Northwestern part of Germany, such as "Plattdeutsch", and Afrikaans, which was originally a Dutch dialect.)
http://ucl.ac.uk/dutch/why_dutch/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language#Classification_and_related_languages


To see in a CHART how Frisian, English.. Dutch (all West Germanic), etc. are related --
(West Germanic: Anglo-Frisian, Old Dutch, Old High German)
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.html

Answer 2

Language Closest To English

Answer 3

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The closest living language to English is Frisian. It is a language spoken by about 500 000 people in areas of Germany and The Netherlands that border on the North Sea. It bears strong similarities to both Dutch and Danish. That's the answer, read up on some linguistics material to learn more. Gramatically, English bears closest resemblance to the Germanic family of languages. But the Romance languages have contributed more vocabulary than any other one source.

Answer 4

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RE:
What language is the closest to English?

Answer 5

I vote French. Why? Because Britain was colonized by the Norman French starting in 1066 and it became the language of the elites. Also, there is Latin in English through the educated classes and obviously Latin in French.

There is almost always a word in English (the educated one) which if pronounced properly is the French word. This works 99% of the time.
Then you only have to learn genders for nouns.

English is a Germanic language but way more distant from modern German than it is from French. I recently translated a document from German to English and you can't even do a literal word for word translation. There may be 3 words in English for one in German. Usually you can literally translate French word for word.

German is very hard. Its relationship to English is not obvious at all and often there is none for modern German words.

Grammar is another thing. German grammar is very, very hard and is more like Latin grammar. French grammar is closer to English in that word order determines meaning in a sentence.

If you want a kindred Germanic language check out Danish or Dutch. Northern England was colonized by the Danish for awhile. Danish has something called glottal stops found in northern England, as well. Danish and Dutch are much closer to English. German is not.

According to a language tree (for living modern languages) it would be Dutch/Flemish or Afrikaans which descend from the same branch. The spelling of Dutch looks very strange to the English eye though. Frisian is also on this line, but is spoken by less than 500,000 people according to wikipedia.

Answer 6

French.

Answer 7

English has a German structure and a largely Latin vocabulary

Answer 8

The ones who said Fresian are the winners. (I have studied the English language extensively.)

Scots is NOT an answer, because:

a) Scots English is ENGLISH!
b) Scots Gaelic is Celtic-based and isn't even close!

Answer 9

Even French (yes indeed!) has influenced English, although it's a roman and non-German language (after the victory of the French in 1066) e.g. flower - fleur, blue - bleu etc.

Answer 10

Take German. German is easier than many people think. It has many older words that are not too far from English. After all, German is the base language for the Germanic family, which includes English!