Which Two European Languages are the Most Similar?

Language similarity among European tongues is a fascinating subject. Two widely known pairs of languages that are remarkably similar are Scottish Gaelic and Irish, as well as Spanish and Portuguese, which share a common family and many grammatical, lexical, and phonetic characteristics.

Scottish Gaelic and Irish: Mutually Intelligible Languages

Scottish Gaelic and Irish are closely related, in fact, to the point where they are mutually intelligible to a significant extent. People who speak one can often understand the other with relative ease, much like how Spanish speakers can easily follow Portuguese. This similarity is striking when compared to other European language pairs.

Scottish Gaelic and Irish, while being officially recognized as separate languages, are often mistaken as dialects due to their high degree of similarity. They both belong to the Goidelic branch of the Celtic language family. However, there are variations among dialects within both languages, some of which can be quite challenging for speakers of modern English to comprehend.

Spanish and Portuguese: A Linguistic Pair of Twins

Evolving from the same Latin roots, Spanish and Portuguese are like fraternal twins in the linguistic world. They not only have a common origin but also share a vast amount of vocabulary and grammatical structures. Spanish and Portuguese are part of the Romance language family, which also includes languages like French, Italian, and Romanian.

Grammatical Similarities

Verbal conjugation: Both languages have similar ways of conjugating verbs, though there are minor variations. Gender and noun agreement: Spanish and Portuguese exhibit a similar system of gender and noun agreement. Vocabulary: Words in Spanish and Portuguese may share the same root or have very similar forms, making it easy for speakers of one language to learn the other.

Complexity in Language Family: Serbian and Croatian

Another interesting pair of languages is Serbian and Croatian. These languages are often considered one and the same, but they are officially recognized as separate languages. They are mutually 99% mutually intelligible. Despite this, they can officially function as distinct languages, as seen with Bosnian, which is another useful addition to the linguistic mix, bringing the mutually intelligible count up to four.

Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin, while recognized as separate languages, are so close that speakers from different countries can often understand each other without much difficulty. This linguistic phenomenon is akin to how Swiss German, Austrian German, and German differ, but remain mutually intelligible to a degree.

Linguistic Close Cousins: Slovak and Czech

When it comes to Germanic languages, Slovak and Czech share a similar story. Even in contemporary times, Slovak and Czech children can easily decipher and comprehend television programs and books in each other's language due to their extremely similar vocabulary.

The core vocabulary of these two languages is nearly identical, with only a few differences in post-fixes and diacritic marks. For instance, the word for 'turtle' is 'elva' in Czech and 'korytnaka' in Slovak, which is such a minor difference. However, one significant difference is in the names of the months. Slovak names for months are very similar to English ones like January, February, March, and so on. In contrast, Czech names are quite different, such as Leden, únor, B?ezec, and Duben.

These differences in month names can cause some confusion, especially for Slovak speakers, as they might not recognize the names in Czech as easily. However, for the most part, these similarities make Slovak and Czech quite easy to understand for each other.