Frisian is an official language in (one of the provinces of) the Netherlands, in the Dutch equivalent of the government page it's stated even as such with so many words. I assume you have chosen to ignore languages if they are not the official language of the entire country?
"Bûter brea en griene tsiis. Wa't dat net sizze kin is gjin oprjochte Fries." My Frisian grandmother taught me that when I was little. My parents grew up speaking Frisian, but had to speak Dutch when they went to school because Frisian was not an official language.
Similar experience to my parents. They were taught in Dutch as soon as they entered school. Now parents can choose to have their children instructed in Frisian until about the 7th grade.
"Butter, rye bread and green cheese, whoever cannot say that is not a genuine Frisian" was a phrase used by the Frisian Pier Gerlofs Donia during a Frisian rebellion (1515–1523). Ships whose crew could not pronounce this properly were usually plundered and soldiers who could not were beheaded by Donia himself.
Interesting. Dutch to me and, I always thought most linguists, is more similar to English than any other Germanic language. They have influenced each other to the point that anyone fluent in German and English can learn Dutch fairly quickly. Most people in the Netherlands understand English very well.
Yea it is rather subjective. The source only used a few words to compare, and a lot of times their choice are very surprising. I-ik (dutch) has 0 similarity score, but I-jeg (danish) scores 50. Who- wie (dutch) again scores 0 and who-hvem (danish) scores 33. Most of them I would have scored differently.
And there is so much to take into consideration. Sound matters more than spelling imo and if it is the same word that dropped a part it often is closer than something more different alrogether(english used to use more prefixes like dutch as in feel/feeling-voel/gevoel (dutch) the "ge" has dropped in english (and added -ing). Danish word be feeling-følelse
Yes, and I must say I find it hard to believe that Afrikaans isn't closer to English than Dutch is. There is a famous poem which can be read in both English and Afrikaans (although it's kind of nonsense and in places the meaning is a bit different in the two languages):
My pen is my wonderland,
Word water in my hand.
In my pen is wonder ink.
Stories sing. Stories blink.
My stories loop. My stories stop.
My pen is my wonder mop.
Drink letters. Drink my ink.
My pen is blind. My stories stink.
(I don't think the last word is really "stink", but it works, and after a line like "my pen is my wonder mop" it seems more appropriate)
Afrikaans is basicly dutch, but developed independently and exposed to different influences, so there are some differences (more than between us and uk english though, but still enough recognisable for anyone that know one language but havent studied the other). So while it is a language in africa it is in origin a european language (classified as western-germanic). Like spanish and portuguese in the americas, they are not in europe but that is where the language comes from (though those have stayed similar enough to still be called the same)
only since 1925 it is officially considered a language, before that it was seen as a dutch dialect. (Did not know it's official recognition was this late actually)
I'm having trouble believing that Danish is 80% the same as English. If that were the case, I would think that they would be nearly mutually intelligible. I just tried reading the Danish Wikipedia article about Denmark: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danmark. I only see a few words that are the same (e.g. "land") or close enough to English to be fully recognizable (e.g. "historie"). Am I misinterpreting what it means to be 20% different?
Curious how it would compare to the dutch wikipedia page for you. I have no doubt it would be more understandable than danish, but hard to estimate the extent of recognition.
Don't ask me how or why but I feel like somehow english is more recognizable to dutch people than dutch is to "english" people, and I don't mean as a result of learning the language or exposure to it, but intuitively. (How it would be in the unrealistic case of zero exposure to the other language)
I knew no Dutch the first time I flew to the Netherlands and yet understood the spoken announcements at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol perfectly. So did my wife, who speaks no German and no Yiddish either.
Dasubergeek, no offense to your language abilities, but those spoken announcements you understood were in English.
For those trying to see how similar languages are by Wikipedia, do you know how to pronounce those languages? Would you know that jag in Danish sounds almost exactly like I?
I have a really hard time understanding how italian is more similar to english than french. French has a lot of germanic influences and the way of not pronouncing things or pronouncing differently every word is very similar to english.
I'm assuming Latin isn't included because there are no native speakers. Greek has a score of 69.9, so it isn't as closely related to English as the other answers.
'one third of English' is misleading. A lot of our technical vocabulary comes from Latin and Greek, but in terms of language we use every day - and indeed our grammar - there's hardly any Latin involved, except filtered through other Romance languages, and even then we're still mostly Germanic
In case anyone is interested, here's some basic background for where English came from. Old English was the language of the Anglo-Saxons in England until 1066, when French was brought in with the Normans' conquest. The Anglo-Saxons of England (also including Jutes and Frisians) came from the land of northwest Germany, the Netherlands, and Jutland, until they invaded Great Britain and founded various kingdoms that would become England, including Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia, Kent, etc. Since they came from that area of continental Europe, Old English is in the same language family as modern Danish, German, Dutch, Frisian, etc. At the time of Old English, Frisian and English were practically indistinguishable. With French influences, the language evolved into Middle English, which is why we have things like the common example of beef vs cow (cow being Germanic, spoken by the common people referring to the animal and beef being French, spoken by the elite referring to food).
What's not so much surprising but striking is the non appearance of the languages which have co evolved on the same island for well over 1,000 years - Welsh and Gaelic. No part of Wales is further than about 100 miles from England, yet English has more in common with Italian.
Description says it's written similarity, but the method described in the source uses sound correspondences...
Also, if anyone is interested, the numbers here don't really mean all that much. It's more of a proof of concept - i.e., if you set the parameters and methodology /very/ carefully, is it theoretically possible to give a numerical 'relatedness' value for a pair of languages - the answer being yes. Which is pretty cool in a way, but there are a lot more ways a pair of languages can be related, beyond just sound correspondences in a very limited set of words - for instance syntax, morphology, or lexicon. This is why Danish is so surprisingly high despite being so unintelligible to an English speaker. In reality, 'relatedness' is a very complex factor which cannot really be quantified in a helpful way.
A weird quiz. Danish is hugely different from English even in written form, yet is supposedly the most similar. I bet no English speaker who doesn't know Danish would ever guess that, for example, Hej, det er meget rart at møde dig means Hello, it is very nice to meet you.
I think the quiz should specify "National, official languages." Because while not guessing Luxembourgian I guessed Frisian, Cornish, Gallic, Gaelic, and Welsh.
I'm surprised by how much variation there is between the Scandinavian languages, since they are all mutually intelligible. I'd expect them to cluster together more tightly in terms of similarity to English.
French is extremely similar in vocabulary. A good chunk of the words in English are originated from French. I was surprised Italian is considered slightly more similar than French
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/erkende-talen/vraag-en-antwoord/erkende-talen-nederland
Frisian is an official language in (one of the provinces of) the Netherlands, in the Dutch equivalent of the government page it's stated even as such with so many words. I assume you have chosen to ignore languages if they are not the official language of the entire country?
"Butter, rye bread and green cheese, whoever cannot say that is not a genuine Frisian" was a phrase used by the Frisian Pier Gerlofs Donia during a Frisian rebellion (1515–1523). Ships whose crew could not pronounce this properly were usually plundered and soldiers who could not were beheaded by Donia himself.
And there is so much to take into consideration. Sound matters more than spelling imo and if it is the same word that dropped a part it often is closer than something more different alrogether(english used to use more prefixes like dutch as in feel/feeling-voel/gevoel (dutch) the "ge" has dropped in english (and added -ing). Danish word be feeling-følelse
My pen is my wonderland,
Word water in my hand.
In my pen is wonder ink.
Stories sing. Stories blink.
My stories loop. My stories stop.
My pen is my wonder mop.
Drink letters. Drink my ink.
My pen is blind. My stories stink.
(I don't think the last word is really "stink", but it works, and after a line like "my pen is my wonder mop" it seems more appropriate)
only since 1925 it is officially considered a language, before that it was seen as a dutch dialect. (Did not know it's official recognition was this late actually)
Don't ask me how or why but I feel like somehow english is more recognizable to dutch people than dutch is to "english" people, and I don't mean as a result of learning the language or exposure to it, but intuitively. (How it would be in the unrealistic case of zero exposure to the other language)
For those trying to see how similar languages are by Wikipedia, do you know how to pronounce those languages? Would you know that jag in Danish sounds almost exactly like I?
West Frisian might (but mainly spoken):
Brea, bûter en griene tsiis / Bread, butter and green cheese.
Also, if anyone is interested, the numbers here don't really mean all that much. It's more of a proof of concept - i.e., if you set the parameters and methodology /very/ carefully, is it theoretically possible to give a numerical 'relatedness' value for a pair of languages - the answer being yes. Which is pretty cool in a way, but there are a lot more ways a pair of languages can be related, beyond just sound correspondences in a very limited set of words - for instance syntax, morphology, or lexicon. This is why Danish is so surprisingly high despite being so unintelligible to an English speaker. In reality, 'relatedness' is a very complex factor which cannot really be quantified in a helpful way.
https://www.lexico.com/definition/letzeburgesch
and actually is one of the two official languages of the Netherlands.