What Language is Closest to English?

Doing English with Julian

20

- What language is closest to English?

Good question, but first, roll that intro.

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening.

I'm Julian Northbrook, from doingenglish.com.

Here today with another, in the English,

history and linguistics series.

What language is the closest to English?

It's a good question,

but as with many in the topic of English history

English linguistics, in general, it depends.

It depends on what, you ask?

Well, it depends on whether you consider Scots

to be a language, or to be a dialect.

That is Scots, as in the thing spoken in Scotland,

but which is distinct from Scottish Gaelic,

which is very much a separate language.

Scottish English, Scots, is it a language?

Is it a dialect?

We're not really sure, and indeed,

this is a contentious issue in general

in linguistics and among language experts,

because we really don't have a good definition

of what constitutes a language,

versus what constitutes a dialect.

Different people have different opinions,

and there tends to be a lot of arguments,

which goes absolutely nowhere,

and while there are people who do believe Scots

to be a separate language,

many also say that it's a dialect,

and personally, I'm inclined to take that viewpoint,

simply because Scotland has Scottish Gaelic,

which, again, is very much a distinct language,

and well, compared with that, Scots,

to me, sounds like a dialect.

Not a very technical or well thought out opinion,

to be sure, but hey, as a working definition,

I reckon it's as good as any.

So Scots out of the way,

what then, is the closest language to English?

Well, that would be Frisian,

or should I say the Frisian languages,

because this is another one of those

is it a dialect, is it a language kind of issues,

or should that be the Frisian languages,

'cause this is another one of those contentious issues.

Are they dialects, or are they languages,

but roughly, Frisian can be split into three.

We have West Frisian, which is spoken

by about 450,000 people in parts of the Netherlands.

Then we have North Frisian,

which is spoken by about 8000 people

in the Schleswig-Holstein of Germany,

and then we hae Sater Frisian,

which is spoken by about 2000 people

in the German state of Lower Saxony.

All of these together really constitute

what we call the Frisian language,

and yes, it would be considered

the most similar language to English,

but how similar to English is it?

Honestly, not very.

You see, English and Frisian both share a common ancestor.

They both come from Germanic,

which became West Germanic,

later Anglo-Frisian, and then at about the time

the Anglo-Saxons started to migrate

over to what is now England,

the languages split into Old English and Old Frisian.

Old English, later mixed with French,

after the Norman Invasion, becoming Middle English,

and then later, Modern English.

Old Frisian, on the other hand,

simply became Frisian.

What this means is that there are lexis,

words shared by both languages,

and often, if you see them written down,

they're actually quite hard to recognise,

but if you hear them said out loud,

they're quite obvious.

Words like day, which in English is spelled D-A-Y,

and in Frisian is spelled D-E-I.

Again, seeing them written down,

you can't really recognise them at all,

but if you're listening to someone speaking Frisian,

you can pick out words here or there,

but in general, it kind of sounds like a language

that you should understand, but actually don't.

But in general, an English speaker

can't really understand it, and in fact,

to me, it actually just sounds like Dutch,

with a few English sounding words sprinkled in for good fun.

This said, apparently, the Dutch don't really understand it

particularly well, either, although, perhaps,

they have a better time of it than the English do.

I must say, Frisian is not exactly high on my list

of languages to learn,

however, of course, if I were going to learn Frisian,

I would start by focusing on those words

that are shared between English and Frisian,

learning those first,

and then learning the common vocabulary,

and then, of course, as I were doing that,

I wouldn't want to forget what I was learning,

which is why I follow the principles laid out

in my new book, English Learning Done Right,

how your brain wants you to learn English,

or, indeed, any other skill so that it never ever forget.

If you struggle with learning words

or phrases or expressions in English,

and then just forgetting them five seconds after,

you're definitely gonna wanna check this bad boy out.

It's available on Amazon Kindle and as always,

it comes with a complete audio version

for your listening enjoyment.

There's the URL in the Resources section at the back.

All you gotta do is register the book,

and the audio gets sent to you.

Link in the description, or englishlearningdoneright.com.

Dutch, on the other hand,

is a language which appeals to me more and more and more,

enough so that I'd actually quite like to have a crack

at learning it.

Not that I actually need Dutch in day to day life,

or indeed, like, ever.

But hey, it seems like an interesting language to learn,

Do you have any questions

about the history of the English language,

or indeed, English linguistics?

If you do, ask away in the comments,

and if there's a good one,

I might answer it in a future video in this series,

but in the meantime, this me, Julian Northbrook,

signing out from another video.

Take care, don't get caught doing anything

that I wouldn't do,

and I'll see you tomorrow.

Have you ever wondered

why the UK has so many different accents?

How about the origins of the word English itself?

Watch this video, and this video to find out more.