What languages are the most similar to English?

Question

I speak English and Bengali with similar proficiency, at least in the 'lower' registers of the languages. Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, despite having different vocabularies, the two languages seemed very similar - faithful word-by-word translations could be performed on sentences without need to restructure or heavily rework their fundamentals or word order.. This contrasted later with my frequent frustration at the French and German learnt later at school, here even the concepts behind the language often seemed alien and upside-down.

I was wondering if any work has been done to compare the 'similarity' between languages and, if so, what languages most closely each other in this way. And which are most like English.

UPDATE: After reading this article at Wired.com I realise that the question I'm asking involves 'lexical distance' in addition to syntactic distance, a phrase I think I just made-up. The diagram above shows the LD between European languages - does anyone have anything similar to show LD/sd between global or Indo-European ones?

Answer 1

Check out this Indo-European language family tree image from Wikipedia:

and also Indo European languages and Latin influence in English.

Answer 2

I am myself a native speaker of Bengali. I also learned English at a very young age. I am really surprised at your comment,

"Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, despite having different vocabularies, the two languages seemed very similar - faithful word-by-word translations could be performed on sentences without need to restructure or heavily rework their fundamentals or word order.. This contrasted later with my frequent frustration at the French and German learnt later at school, here even the concepts behind the language often seemed alien and upside-down."

In fact, Bengali and English, share many common roots in their vocabulary, going back to (the reconstructed) proto-Indo-European. This is obvious just from looking at the words for numbers, much more so for the old Sanskrit forms, as also for nose, mouth, hand, foot, etc., taking into account well known sound shifts. This commonality of root vocabulary between Bengali and English is only one example of the more general commonality in this regard between Indic (Indo-Aryan) and (most) European languages.

However, when it comes to syntax, including word order, the Indic languages (including Bengali) are very different indeed from the major European languages (of the Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic families, along with Albanian and Greek) including English.

You can see this, for example, if you translate the English sentence:

"I put the book on the table."

into Bengali:

"(Ami) boi-t'a tebil-er opor-e rakh-l-am."

where I have separated out compounds into their parts with a hyphen (-).

If you were to translate the Bengali back into English word for word, it would read:

"(I) book-the table's top-at put-did-I."

If you had instead translated the original sentence word for word into Bengali, it would have read,

"Ami rakh-l-(am) t'a-boi e t'a-tebil."

where the general Bengali positional postposition "e" stands for the specific English preposition "on", and the Bengali definite article suffix "t'a" has been used for the English definite article prefix "the", with postposition and preposition locations of course interchanged.

Answer 3

Apart from Scots, the closest languages to English in terms of lexical difference are probably the various English-based creoles, such as Tok Pisin, Bislama or Jamaican Patois. These have a mostly English vocabulary base, even though much of their grammar derives from from non Indo-European languages.

Unfortunately I've not found many numbers to back this up. The closest I found so far is the following diagram from A Grammar of Pichi by Kofi Yakpo, showing the lexical distance of Pichinglis (spoken in Equatorial Guinea) to a number of other languages including English.

I've also seen measures of phonological distance used to cluster English dialects and creoles (see for example Clustering Dialects Automatically: A mutual information approach), but I've not seen a similar study for syntactic distance. For a description of approaches to quantifying syntactic distance between languages see for example A Vector Space Model for Syntactic Distances Between Dialects.

Answer 4

ezglot compares a number of languages for lexical similarity, and provides some interesting statistics. For English, widely spoken languages German and French have highest similarity scores..

Answer 5

Scots is the closest language to English, after that perhaps Norwegian. Norwegian seems slightly closer to English than either Danish or Swedish is.

Answer 6

Etymologically - and more specifically than just "Indo-European", English is in a language family called "Anglo-Frisian". Anglo-Frisian languages can be further separated into "English" (English, Scots, and a couple of extinct languages) and Frisian languages. So etymologically, English's closest living relatives would be:

• Scots
• Extinct languages - Yola and Fingallian
• Any of the Frisian languages (West, North, and Saterland)

BTW, my friends who speak both Dutch and English have told me that Frisian seems closer to Dutch than English, so taking their word for its value, I'd say you'll be hard pressed to find a language other than Scots that is mutually intelligible with Modern English.

As a side note, digging a bit further back into the language trees, and looking at the West Germanic languages (of which Anglo-Frisian is a subgroup), Afrikaans has some pretty cool relations to English. Wikipedia gives this as an example:

Afrikaans: En ek sê vir julle, wat soek julle hier by my? Ek soek julle nie! Nee, gaan nou weg!

English: And I say to you, what do you seek here by me? I do not seek you! No, go away now!

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A fun little thing: this is a classic folk song sung in Yola. I've always liked to imagine that it's a bit what non-English speakers hear when they hear English (try starting around 2:15)!