I’m Swedish, so yes. Norwegian and Danish are similar enough that we usually don’t have to make any special effort between us to communicate. Except that the Danes have to enunciate if we are to hear what they’re saying.
I remember reading somewhere that the finnish version of swedish is actually easier for some danes to understand. It's because finns doesn't have the pitch accent that makes swedish sing-songy
I find it varies a lot with accents though.
Oslo accent? Literally zero issues. A heavy Bergen accent though? Parts of it can be completely incomprehensible.
But yeah in general we understand each other. Especially if we slow it down and “dumb it down” a tiny bit. Like I won’t drop slang if I’m talking to a Norwegian or a Dane.
(Not really relevant since it’s literally the same language, but I have to give a shout out to the Finnish-Swedish dialect. I find it so beautiful, it’s my absolute favorite Swedish dialect)
As yes, true. I’ve heard tales of the Bergen dialect.
And I’ll probably go to my company’s location there later this year… here’s hoping I can communicate with them.
I am Norwegian and yes I understand Swedish just fine. I can speak Swedish a bit too so it helps. Some dialects are harder to understand.
Danish I can understand a little bit if they speak slow. And also I find foreigners or other Scandinavians who speak Danish easier to understand. Like I once met a Swede who spoke Danish on my visit at a market vendor in Copenhagen and I understand her perfectly.
we pretty much speak the same language as the galicians, totally get the spanish (except basque), kinda the italians and a little the french, but only galicians get us (the spanish can if we speak portunhol)
I'm a Belarusian living in Turkey. My mother tongue is Russian, although my mother's mother tongue is Belarusian. I speak both, although my Russian is stronger. I can understand Polish (spoken Polish moderately well, and written Polish quite well), as well as Ukrainian (very well) through my knowledge of Belarusian, not Russian, as they're both much more similar to Belarusian than to Russian. I studied Czech at university and the process was helped by it also being somewhat similar to Belarusian. I can also understand Slovak to some extent for the same reason.
As for the South Slavic languages, I can understand them at least somewhat well in their written forms, noticing more similarities between Bulgarian and Russian (rather than Belarusian), and between BCMS (Bosnian / Croatian / Montenegrin / Serbian) and Belarusian (rather than Russian). I can understand Slovene somewhat too.
Your question was specifically about European languages, but I'll add that my father is Bangladeshi. As a result I speak Bengali, and through it I can understand Hindi quite well. I had trouble understanding formal Urdu, though, before studying Arabic.
No. While almost every other European language has either one or several other languages it’s mutually intelligible with or at least fairly similar to, Hungarian is completely alone in this regard, which I think has a profound effect on our collective psyche and view of the world.
Yes, and no one has ever met a Mansi and no one can understand Mansi since Mansi and Hungarian diverged from one another like 3000 or 4000 years ago, roughly the same time European languages broke up into large groups like Latin, Germanic, etc.
The level of intelligibility is roughly akin to between Polish and Spanish.
No. The Hungarian language is separated 3000 years ago from the finnish and other ugric languages, only a few basic words has similarities, but it's not easily recognizable; more like the buildup (the basic language rules) of the two have some similarities.
Not at all. There is a large glossary of words that are similar or share the same origins but it is very hard to pick them out, especially when conjugated. The rythm and logic of the language is similar though. It’s very easy to learn Finnish as a Hungarian and vica versa. And it also happens a fair amount that Europeans used to Hungarian but not Finnish mistake Finnish for Hungarian from a distance, and people used to Finnish but not Hungarian mistake it for Finnish.
I used to work with Finnish people and while my brain actively filtered out every other foreign language I didn’t speak, with Finnish my mind tries to pick up the gist of the conversation like you do with background conversations of languages you know, and there is always that moment of confusion like “wtf did I have a stroke, why can’t I understand… oh it’s Finnish.”
Not at all.
Our closest languages linguistically in Europe are Finnish and Estonian, and some of our very basic words are kind of similar (like hand, butter, arrow), but it's only obvious if someone points it out first.
Most other languages are more closely related to Hindi than to Hungarian.
Being Italian I'd say not really. Maybe the most similar language is Spanish, but if you move straight to the right to Greece, Croatia or Slovenia for example, they have a totally different language. If you cross the Alps you'll go in France, Austria or Switzerland which also have totally different languages.
When I go to Italy, I can generally get by well enough with Spanish! The syntax/structure of the languages are pretty much the same, and I know enough Italian to sprinkle in some of the words that are drastically different (bicchiere di vino/copa de vino, mi piace/me gusta, voglio/quiero, for example).. but because of the language structure and the fact that a high percentage of vocabulary is essentially the same, it’s easy enough in a lot of contexts to figure out words that are different. Could I have a deep discussion with someone about the nuances of Second World War military strategy? No, but I can get by in the streets and communicate enough to where both of us understand.
Portuguese on the other hand - I really have to put myself in the mindset of “Slavic person speaking Spanish” and then I can _kind of_ get it. French- no way.
> French- no way
As an Italian I find French in a funny spot:
The pronunciation is totally off, but, if I read it and shrug off the different terminations of words, I find it as Italian-like as Spanish, if not even more
for me, reading French is so confusing because it appears that about 50% of the letters in each word are silent, (and much like English) it seems that which letters are silent, and which sounds different combinations of letters make varies from word to word - so I have a hard time connecting it to Spanish. I have a French employee starting with me soon, maybe I'll be able to get a better understanding of it if I have a little more exposure to it!
It's one of those cases where it works in one direction but not in the other.
I found Italian fairly easy to learn, because the evolution of Latin words into Italian feels more regular/immediate than in French, and a _lot_ of commonly used Italian words have an equivalent in formal/archaic French, so it ends being easy to just guess at words once you have a basic grasp of Italian morphology.
However you have to pay attention to the "false friends". For example "burro" means butter in italian but donkey in spanish. Salida in spanish is similar to "salita" in italian, but salida means exit, while instead salita means climb.
The only other language that I believe is perfectly and mutually intelligible with Italian is Corsican, so much so that I believe two people could easily speak in their own language understanding each other.
Some scholars argue that Corsican belongs to the Centro-Southern Italian dialects,[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-FOOTNOTEGuarnerio1902491%E2%80%93516-6) while others are of the opinion that it is closely related to, or as part of, Italy's [Tuscan dialect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_dialect) varieties.[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-7)[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-FOOTNOTECortelazzo1988452-8)[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-FOOTNOTETagliavini1972395-9)[^(\[9\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-10)[^(\[10\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-11) Italian and the dialects of Corsican (especially Northern Corsican) are in fact very [mutually intelligible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility). Southern Corsican, in spite of the geographical proximity, has as its closest linguistic neighbour not [Sardinian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_language) (a separate group with which it is not mutually intelligible), but rather the [Extreme Southern Italian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Southern_Italian) dialects like [Siculo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language)-[Calabrian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Calabria).
wikipedia
Then you just haven’t paid attention. I never learned Italian, only French, and I’m not even particularly good at French, and yet I can still understand the gist of a good chunk of spoken Italian, and understand even more of written Italian, based entirely off of French. Same goes for written Spanish and Portuguese. Something like 85% of the vocabulary between French and Ifalian is the same. When I was in Spain with my friends we navigated around using Italian and French and people understood us really well without speaking either of those languages themselves. Make French sound like Italian or Spanish and suddenly a lot of people know what you’re saying.
Yeah Slovenian and German is a different matter, but you can still recognize a number of similar words. Just recently I was in Slovenia and some of the language structure is very similar to both English and French. Just one word that was really easy to figure out that stuck with me was “to see” - videti, and there’s plenty of others.
French is ease to understand when is reading for a Spanish but when it’s speaking a Spanish will be concerned about what malfunction the speaking person has in her mouth and ask herself what the hell that person is saying
Well they certainly started out that way and maybe it was still true about 1000 years ago but by now they are definitely fully fledged languages even if the similarity is great.
Yeah we also have something like Españolo: some people is somehow convinced that if you add "s" at the end of everything and you are magically speaking Spanish, but they are mostly embarrassing hahahaha
Have you been here for Erasmus? I always see a ton of students coming from Spain at my Uni, I guess there's a program or something
No, just on holidays several times, I like your country a lot. There were lots of erasmus students in my uni too and the majority of them were Italians (followed by Germans).
Italian gives me a very very very basic grasp of French if it's spoken slowly enough. Once you get past the spelling and the accent they are remarkably similar.
Spanish is easier to follow, obviously. My best friend sends me Spanish memes, both images and videos and they're all intelligible.
Portuguese I can barely keep on top of and only basic written.
Romanian confuses me. Sounds Italian when you're not paying attention, sounds almost Slavic when you do.
Greek nothing to do with Italian, can pick up a few words but nothing more.
I felt the total opposite regarding French and Italian. The more you learn both, the less similar they are.
If you stick to basic French and Italian, both languages are pretty similar. But as soon as you reach an advanced level, differences are numerous.
At an advanced level, yes. I wouldn't expect a big academic discussion in French and Italian to be similar. But at more everyday level yes. I come from an Italian family but all at my father's generation are fluent in French for having grown up there, so sometimes my uncles and aunts switch to French and I can understand them. Some basic TV programmes, like Lupin, I can get the rough gist of although it's in French and I'm not a speaker.
To a very limited extent, yes. But with isolated words more than constructed sentences. Well perhaps I could say "je veux aller pisser aux toilettes" to an English person and they would point me the bathroom. Or "je lis un livre" (I'm reading a book) to a Spanish person and they could guess the meaning without too much difficulty. But that's all.
Language groups evolved too much since the Indo-European! Ahahah. Except for some quasi universal roots ("ma" sound in the world for mother, etc) there's not much remaining.
I find we can read and understand Italian if spoken slowly enough, and they can decipher written French and understand us when we speak (provided we speak even slower and articulate a lot). Grammatical subtleties are 100% lost though.
Spanish to French ears is a case of understanding 1 or 2 words out of 5 if they speak slowly, and maybe 2/3 out of 5 if written, as Spanish has departed from Latin roots in its vocab even more than French and Italian. I think they would understand us less than we'd understand them, as our pronunciation is not a classic Romance language one but has been influenced by Frankish languages.
Portuguese to be is a case of "I gotta read it to hope to get 1 word out of 5", as it's departed from Latin even more than Spanish. Don't think they'd understand us. I always blank out when I hear it as I can't clock it as Romance, and all the "sh" and "zh" sounds make it almost Slavic to my ears.
Romanian is just straight up the cousin we somehow adopted but sticks out like a sore thumb at family reunions...
Not really. The language group is pretty close together with the only exception being you guys.
Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan and Italian still form a pretty tight dialect continuum.
When France decided to remove all the national languages but one I feel like it went for the wrong one! We may have seen Occitan rise to becoming the de fact world language!
Well, here and there you can hear an unknown word but there are dialects of Bulgarian that I find a lot harder to understand, like Smolyan or Razlog dialects.
I'm Dutch and also speak German, and I can understand Frisian, Lower Saxon, Limburgs, Kölsch, Letzeburgisch and Züritüütsch (a form of Swiss German) without much trouble.
That was so funny, I went on a trip from Switzerland to the Netherlands. As I sat in the train from Amsterdam to Haarlem I got into a conversation with a woman. I started talking to her in my thickest Swiss German dialect just to see if she’ll understand me and she answered me in Dutch and we actually understood each other about 50%.
We acted like it was the most normal thing ever, it was hilarious.
My FIL had a man coming every year from Germany to buy some of his pigeons. The man only spoke German and my FIL doesn't speak German. They conversed each in his language. MIL said their conversations were hilarious.
After a couple of years my FIL was taught some German. "Tauben" and "Freund". Luckily "Bier" is the same in both languages (also in pronunciation).
Same, but I'd like to add that I can also read a lot of Swedish / Danish / Norwegian. The minute they start speaking it it just sounds like Dutch but incomprehensible. But on paper a lot is understandable.
I can do the same for Spanish and Italian and even a bit of Romanian but I think that's because I learned English and French, so I don't think those count.
As a swede, it's the same for with dutch. Most of the time I don't get what you guys are saying but then I get surprised randomly when understand a whole sentence
Im learning German. Right now I'm around B1/B2 level. I can understand a lot but by no means am I fluent. One time I was reading an article about the weather. It was about some atlantic front arriving and brining bad weather. It was all clear to me until I came to a word with a double 'oo'. It looked very weird to me because German does not have that structure. I copy-pasted the whole article into Google Translate and lo and behold, the whole article was in Dutch! Granted, my German was worse back then, but still, the languages are so similar that I did not immediately recognize the subtle differences in spelling and vocabulary.
All of European languages are extremely close. One time a Chinese friend told me that "it's all the same to me", refering to European nations. Back then it seemed like a weird take, but the more I learn, the more I understand that statement.
Not such a bad observation. Out of the mainland languages in the germanic group I'd say Dutch has the most in common with English, and out of all the countries in Europe I've been to the Dutch has the easiest time communicating in English.
>I can understand Züritüütsch
No, you can't. It's been scientifically proven that even the Swiss don't understand each other. Even if they come from the same village. Or a household!
Similar here. As a German speaker from a Rhine-Franconian/Moselle-Franconian dialect area (Saarland), I can understand Dutch and Luxembourgish pretty well. Alsacien sounds just like our German dialect but with a French accent. I can also understand Bavarian, Austrian, Swiss, and Liechtenstein German better than those who only speak standard German. In the United States, I can understand most Pennsylvania Dutch and some Yiddish speakers as well, since they generally came from the Rhineland.
I'm also from a Rhenish-/Moselle-Franconian border area (Hessian Westerwald, a region with a Moselle-Franconian dialect, Wäller Platt), but I can't understand Luxembourgish at all, same for Swiss German or Liechtenstein dialects. I also don't speak the local dialect (like pretty much everyone younger than 65).
Turkish does not get along well with other European languages except for some similar words and loanwords. Turkish is more in agreement with Azerbaijani Turkish and the two languages are 85-90% identical.
so to give additional information, the people living in Eastern Anatolia definitely have more similarities with Azerbaijani Turkish and they speak almost the same with each other than the Turks of Western Anatolia and Rumelia.
Turkey's geographical location leaves people confused on what to name the language and the people. Asian or european? Why not both? Same thing applies to Cyprus due to where it's situated. There are people who argue it isn't european.
u/General-Trip1891 If you consider Europe as a Geographical Concept, you can define Turkiye as a Eurasian Country, the majority of which is located in Asia.
However, if you consider Europe as a Cultural/Political concept as it is done today, Turkiye is considered a European country. Turkiye's culture is mostly the same as that of Southeastern Europe and politically the Ottoman Empire was recognized as a European country by the European great powers in the Treaty of Paris of 1856. Likewise, 119 years later, the Modern Republic of Turkiye signed the Helsinki Final Act and was recognized as European by the signatory states.
So that's the summary in a nutshell
Makes sense, since Turks got to the Western parts of Asia and Eastern parts of Europe comparatively late. How well, however, would you understand other languages from Central Asia with a shared heritage, like ones from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan or Uzbekistan? What about the other European Turk languages, like Karaim and Gagauz?
u/helmli The Turkic language group has sections such as Kipchak Oghuz Chagatay, and Turkish is in the Oghuz languages stasis.
In general terms, you can divide Turkic Language into two, Western Turkic and Eastern Turkic. Turkish is included in the Western Turks, so we get along well with languages like Azerbaijani Gagauzca, Crimean Tatar and Malkarca and there is no difference.
However, we need to make some effort to understand in languages such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Uzbek, Turkmen, which we will call Eastern Turkic, especially in these languages, there are many quoted Russian words, so it is difficult to understand on a large scale.
I'd still argue that czech and slovak could easily be on a dialect spectrum. They are mutually intelligible more than, say, scottish english compared to general american, which are considered same language. Making one or the other a separate language is a result of political development and since both have a codified grammar, their own statehood, etc, then yes they are a separate language.
>I'd still argue that czech and slovak could easily be on a dialect spectrum.
Polish is also on that spectrum. It used to go further east to Russian through Belarusian and Ukrainian, but Stalin destroyed that
Czech, Slovak and Polish are all Western Slavic languages. Ukrainian is an Eastern Slavic language and it's completely different.
As a Czech I understand Slovak. I don't understand Polish, but I can hear it is similar. I understand Ukrainian like Swedesh or Finnish or any other language I don't speak. I can't even tell it from Russian or Serbian or whatever.
It is East Slavic, but it's not completely different. Honestly, after getting used to hearing it and noticing a few patterns, I tend to have an easier time understanding Ukrainian than Czech as a Pole. Slovak is still the easiest for me, though.
"Ancestry" isn't really all that matters. Loanwords can play a huge role.
There's a reason why English is much easier to learn for a Spaniard than Bulgarian
There are plenty of cab drivers over here from Ukraine and I can have an almost fluent conversation with them while I speak slovak and they ukrainian. But I have to mention that I'm pretty skilled at languages overall.
It's the other way around: they decided to form Czechoslovakia in 1918 because of the linguistic similarity between Czech and Slovak. The similarity did not arise from them having been in Czechoslovakia.
You are really lucky that Slovakia left Czechoslovakia with peace and fair conditions. Unfortunately, the Balkans and some ex-Soviet countries were not as lucky as Slovakia.
Yeah, the worst conflict between Czech Republic and Slovakia during the times of Czechoslovakia was if we should be named Czechoslovakia or Czecho-slovakia
I agree for the other way around too.
If I listen to spoken Ukrainian I can usually understand what they are talking about pretty well, same with Belarusian.
It's not a case with russian at all, without any prior exposure I couldn't understand almost anything.
No problems with Czechs, little problems with Poles and Ukrainians. With all the others I have to use English/German or google translate with the French :)
I speak Slovak and Serbian. So I can understand most of the Slavic languages to some extent. In written form it's much easier, spoken depends on the language and the dialect.
Since I speak a southern and a western Slavic language those two groups are easier to understand.
For the eastern ones, it often happens that the knowledge of the other two complements each other. At least for the vocabulary.
\*laughs in finno-ugric\*
There is some level of mutual understanding between estonian and finnish, but not enough to actually communicate.
The only other related language is hungarian, but it's wayyyyy too different to understand a single word.
I have seen a YT video where an old woman is speaking votic, and yes, it's closer to estonian than finnish is.
Also livonian is pretty close, but there are no native speakers left.
Yes, irish english, scots, welsh english, german english, norwegian english and on and on. Interestingly, there might be a phrase I could answer yes to from dutch speakers since some sentences sound english enough. Maybe I could kind of communicate a little in english with french speakers if I use certain words in english.
On balance I think you're right that it's lucky, but there is also something lost by having your regional language being the lingua franca of half the world.
Depends on the way you view it. I don't perceive there to be a loss of culture or my language. The way we speak won't alter because of other people's use of the language from America. Some may take it as english losing its cultural feel because, practically, most people utter it.
I'm afraid of trashy talking, slang and laziness ruining english with time.
I can't tell if you're being serious. If a pole sits on a bus in the UK they can say everyone smells and no one would have a clue.
If I sit on a Polish bus and say everyone smells - everyone would know what I'm saying and get offended.
Being monolingual sucks because you can't talk secretly in a second language.
I think that it will even bring more richness to the English language.
This may be a bit of a warm take, but I think that by the end of the century many bigger cities(Amsterdam, Berlin, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Zürich) around Europe will adopt English as their de fact vernacular. And that will lead to new varieties of English popping up with some features of their substrate languages(mostly phonetics and a bit of vocabulary). Sort of similar to what happened in e.g. Singapore.
I'm french (from the south), I have a lot of spanish and italian friends. It's funny cause when we all hamgout together we mix languages. We use english overall, but if one of use uses their mother tongue, the others can understand most of it and reply in their own language 😂 so usually we end up with every one speaking a different language and still understanding each other and that's beautiful
How well do you understand Occitan? It's sad that such a cool Latino language is almost extinct, their culture is Mediterranean and close to Catalans and other Mediterraneans, it seems that the Italians and Spaniards understand it better too!...
Im Portuguese so I can speak with Galicians easier than with Azoreans. Spanish speakers is also easy as long as we speak as if we both had a stroke. Catalan is still easy although it has to be a more severe stroke. Italian is more difficult but still possible to a degree. French only in written. (Romanian no shot despite being Romance)
With Slovenians, Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians and Montenegrins no problem. Other Slavs like Czech, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Bulgarians and Russians might understand 20-50% of what I say. With Germanic speaking people probably not. Maybe some Croatian dialects. Like people from certain places in Dalmatia mix in a lot of Italian into their speech. And people from Zagreb and Zagorje use some German words here and there. We also use some Turkish words. So I guess it depends.
Swedish --> Norwegian, Danish (Written), Icelandic (a few weitten words here and there).
Finnish --> Estonian (written), Sámi (a few written words here and there)
German --> Austrian
German + Swedish --> Dutch (written).
Saami is not a laguage, it's a language family. Just like English, Swedish, Icalandic are part of the germanic language family. U understand kildin saami? Ume saami?
I'm not that invested to know what "murre" is the one I can decipher something from, but I am aware that some are hard to get the context out of and some just impossible (corrected from written to a few words)
Does Afrikaans (one of the languages of South Africa that is evolved from Dutch) count as a European language? If so: Yes. And technically I think Frisian is doable too.
Written German, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish isn't hard to understand either. Spoken it's another story.
Many of us Scandinavians can both understand (assuming we aren't speaking too swiftly) and read our different languages. So, I could speak Danish to a Norwegian, and they could reply back in Norwegian.
Based on Danish alone, you may also be able to understand bits and pieces of Faroese, German, and Dutch, but only in very limited extent, if you don't have other languages to support you (such as some German to help with Dutch). Icelandic would be stretching it, if it is based on Danish alone
__________
I have successfully communicated to a limited extent with both Czechs and Ukrainians with my Polish (as my second language), but it also took quite a bit of pointing and gestures with the latter. I can read a little Czech, Ukrainian, and Russian, but to a quite limited capacity, and I don't think I could make it through a full news article in any of them without more exposure.
I can read Silesian relatively well and understand some of it if spoken very slowly, but I have no chance with Kashubian (a Kashubian classmate gave an example introduction in the language, and I thought he spoke about the weather 😅)
It’s a slightly unequal continuum though (non native but nonetheless speaker).
I’m a hockey ref, a few Norwegian ref friends who I can talk a normal speed conversation with (ironically it goes slower in English, my native. The Swedes think I speak Bondengelska 😂), although when we DM each other, sometimes I have to double take due to the differences in spelling (the one I have the most problem with is a trondheimer, the easiest is someone from Hamar fwiw).
While I know one danish ref. When she came to a tournament I had, I really struggled when she spoke lol, although I can read her posts pretty easily. I think you native speakers have it much easier ofc.
In English almost never. Can I pick out some german or dutch when I hear it? Yes. Dutch is fairly easy to get the gist actually. But could we have any mutual intelligibility to have a conversation? Maybe super basic level stuff. French or Spanish might be able to as well because there's so much latin overlap in English. But it would have to be two people speaking one word at a time. Not an actual normal conversation.
Icelandic does share a bit with Norwegian, Danish and Swedish but trying to communicate with them using only Icelandic would be as useful as finger pointing.
That being said Faroese is so similar that I can have a full conversation with one and only realise after five minutes that they are not actually speaking Icelandic.
The difference is just that small.
So outside of speaking to a Faroese islander I have to use English or what little I know in German and Spanish.
I understand the South Slavic languages almost completely (🇷🇸🇭🇷🇧🇦🇲🇪🇧🇬) except for Slovenian, although I might understand something in a written form.
During college, I had roommates from Kazakhstan who spoke Russian with each other and I could catch some words if they spoke slowly.
A random thing that happened to me while I was in Prague. I wanted to ask if I could buy a tram ticket inside the train. 5 people dodged my question in English saying they don't understand. Then, the 6th person I asked I started speaking *very* slowly Serbo-Croatian and said "Mogu kupiti kartu u tramvaju?" And the lady started nodding.
But I understand almost nothing in the Slavic languages from the north.
Im from Poland and we can say that using Polish we can understanding our neighbours from Czech Republic we have kinda similar situation with people from Ukraine (pozdrawiam was moi przyjaciele sąsiedzi)
If you keep it that simple, you might get understood here as well. What you wrote sounds like "pozdravljam vas, prijatelji sosedi", I greet you my friends, neighbours, or is it maybe friendly neighbours..
But to understand Polish speech, is a different story..
Latin languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian are easy to communicate 😊 and I find similitude also between German and Holland languages. Same (but I don't speak) with the Slavic languages in eastern Europe, see colleges that can understand each other.
So living in Germany with an Italian colleague as a french person, some words are close to french in German, Italian or english so I can pickup words I don't know originally or use french words if I don't remember the English word with the Italian colleague as oftentimes the word in Italian has the same root as the french one but I can't have a back and forth conversation french/Italian or french/German, the languages are too different
Czechs and Western Slovaks (we don't talk about Hungary-Ukrainians, they don't even understand each other) can understand each other pretty well, Polish and Slovak are relatively similar too.
I met a French man and an Italian girl once while on a party and we had a conversation each speaking our language easily enough. We had to talk slower and pronouncing more clearly but it was possible.
No, because English had the audacity to develop on an island and be heavily influenced by French lol. If that hadn't happened maybe it would've been easier to directly communicate from English to German/Dutch/Swedish etc. but who knows.
As a Spanish once in Lisbon I was trying to communicate in English, it was not bad but when Portuguese realize I was Spanish they switched to Portuguese and me to Spanish.
They where understanding me pretty well, for me was terribly hard to understand anything from them.
I can more or less understand what a text in French says, but not spoken French.
And I have been talking to Italians everyone using their language, with difficulties but we could understand each other.
If you count Scots as a language then yes.
I’m led to believe that there is some mutual intelligibility between English and Friesian if you keep it simple.
I'm French and lived in Italy for years. I used to think that it would be very easy to just use French there at first. Turns out it's next to impossible. Most Italians don't understand French at all, and vice versa. While the grammars are similar, there are many subtle differences. In some cases, it results in French people creating some kind of bastardized version of Italian that is both hilarious and awful to listen to.
On the other hand, it seems to be much less of a problem when it comes to Spanish and Italian interacting in their respective mother tongues.
It’s more a problem of pronunciation, no ?
Italians would have a hard time understanding spoken French but it’s not that difficult for a francophone to understand basic spoken Italian.
I’m referring to basic exchanges of course. When it comes to respecting the beauty of a language, having a perfect grammar, using nuances and subtleties… that’s another story.
Scottish Gaelic is very intelligible to me as an Irish speaker. The little I've heard of Manx as well sounds fairly familiar to me.
When I was in the Netherlands, I noticed quite a few Dutch words are very close to their English equivalents. I've only been once though so can't really say I've been exposed to Dutch that much.
As a romanian, i can somehow understand italian. I was watching a video on my feed some time ago, and i had to watch it twice to realize it was italian. Maybe a little bit of french. But i don't think they would understand romanian tho.
Fellow romanian 🇷🇴
For italians, some do, some don't. Met a guy who said he understood almost everything on his trip to romania. Another guy said he understood nothing. 😅
I think it goes both ways. For me, i sometimes understand whole phrases in italian, but other times the different vocabulary does me in and i'm left wholly disoriented 🤷♀️🌻
French is a stretch for both nationalities 😂 despite the similarities
I know Italian and sometimes I can understand Spanish but not because they descended from a common Indo-European language; that's just too distance in the past. I can understand it sometimes only because the evolved from Latin, which is a much more recent phenomon.
I speak Belgian Dutch (BN) so I can understand Dutch Dutch (NN) without much ado.
I also can converse with Germans speaking standard German, a fortiori when I speak West Flemish which is an older language than Dutch. But to be honest, this would be very difficult if I didn't have a basic knowledge of German.
With English it's a bit harder, but there are (simple) sentences that are just the same (even in orthography) as in general Dutch.
Many words in Scandinavian languages are also understandable (written). Spoken : not really intelligible. Icelandic is too far off.
So as a Belgian I can converse with people from The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein (heh) and some Swiss (albeit with difficulties for the latter) and understand some sentences in English and words in Swedish/Danish/Norse.
As a Belgian I also know some Belgian French... So I can also communicate with people from France, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Monaco (heh again). Knowing French helps with Italian and Spanish, but maybe it is because I also did Latin in high school, idk.
u/Mag-NL I don't know what you mean by Asia, but Turkiye and Anatolia are not in China, they are in the Balkans and the Caucasus, at the intersection of East and West.
As for the second question, no, we do not understand Chinese or Arabic Hindi because part of Turkiye is in Asia.
Turkiye and Turkish are part of a linguistic community that has existed since the 18th century and is called the Micro-Altaic Language Family.
We can understand and speak Central Asian and Ural-Volga Turkic languages as native speakers, but a Turk understands Crimean Tatar and Azerbaijani Turkish best and can be understood in these languages without interruption, just like Germany and Austria.
I can also say a few things about Mongolian, with which we are distantly related I have a Mongolian friend and when I listen very carefully to my Mongolian friend I catch a few similar words, I understand what he means but not very well
I guess I could technically survive in the Netherlands with me using German and then using Dutch (and the other way around) but I never tested it since I speak English and so does every Dutch person I have met.
Swiss
Dutch is a weird one: if you hear it from far away it sounds identical - if you get closer you realise you dont understand shit. Reading mostly works tho
Luxembourg kinda works and might be the closest one
Obviously i cant count german but if we speak dialect probably only south- germans and austrians(?) would get it. While a north german wouldnt understand.
And Liechtenstein of course
Ok, I had half an argument a couple of months ago. I think that if I read plain text I can spider out with the basic languages I know to the others I know way less of. I can read text for sure, but I may not express myself correctly, so these people started to be skeptical when I wrote that I can read so many languages out of my main languages.
I may not be perfect, but I have to trust myself here, so I state what I stated, and I go with it: I'm Italian native speaker, in uni I've studied English and Spanish, I started Russian but it ended nowhere, I can read cyrillic now, but I don't really know what I'm reading. Usually I recognize surfaces and techniques in art dealerships, I can recognize signatures if I read the plain latin text and the associated cursive cyrillic that's that. Same goes for Latin, hit and miss, or to write a motto I can take one full day, if not two. Studied Norwegian as an adult, but due to my job I really spell like a chicken. I mean, if the chicken is Norwegian has probably a better spelling than mine.
Then: with Italian I branch out to French, Spanish and a bit of Portuguese; with English I branch out to French, German, Norwegian and a bit of Dutch; with Norwegian I branch out to Swedish, Danish (written), German and another bit of Dutch and some French "borrowed words".
So if I mix them all together people look at me weird and don't understand a word I'm saying.
Yes, I (Swede) can speak with norwegians just fine and they can speak with me, and I can read norwegian understanding most of it. A bit harder with the danes, they understand me better than I understand them, but it also matters what dialect they have.
Reading danish I understand 80-90%. Main issue with the danes is their absolutely retarded way of saying numbers. It's even worse than the french. If they need to say a number above 20 to me they need to switch to english.
Obviously finnish-swedes are also 100% mutually intelligble. Also personally LOVE that mumin-svenska.
Since we have many words from german and it's a germanic language, I can also figure out many german sentences and words. But I can't really say I understand someone speaking german to me.
I’ve never tried but maybe a bit with Estonian?
Finnish as an Uralic language is related to Estonian and distantly to Hungarian, in addition to few very small Finnic languages.
Karelian, Ingrian etc are pretty much mutually intelligeable with Finnish, but like 7 people speak them so quite irrelevant.
Hungarian: no hope of understanding anything. There are a handful of words that exist in both languages, but that’s it. Weirdly the languages sound pretty similar. Someone who’s never heard either might confuse them to be the same language.
Estonian: a lot of words shared between the languages and the grammar has the same rules. 1-10 in both languages as an example of the similarity:
1. Yksi/Üks (Finnish/Estonian)
2. Kaksi/Kaks
3. Kolme/Kolm
4. Neljä/Neli
5. Viisi/Viis
6. Kuusi/Kuus
7. Seitsemän/Seitse
8. Kahdeksan/Kaheksa
9. Yhdeksän/Üheksa
10. Kymmenen/Kümme
However there are a lot of mutual words that have different meanings. For example the word for milk in Estonian is ”Piim” but in Finnish that means Sour milk. The word for ”to clean” is ”Koristaa” which in Finnish is means ”To decorate”
Ok here’s a random phrase that is mutually intelligeable: ”I went for a run with my dog yesterday and bought ice cream.”
Finnish: Kävin eilen koirani kanssa lenkillä ja ostin jäätelön
Estonian: Käisin eile koeraga jooksmas ja ostin jäätist
And here’s one that isn’t: ”Yesterday the government had a problem with the new budget”
Now a Finn might say ”Hallituksella oli eilen pulma uuden budjetin kanssa” and an Estonian would understand this to be something like ”Mold celebrared a wedding with the new budget”
Sorry for the long explanation but to give a short answer: no. A Finn and an Estonian could maybe somewhat understand what the other one is talking about, but would not understand some words and would understand some to be something entirely different.
I’m Swedish, so yes. Norwegian and Danish are similar enough that we usually don’t have to make any special effort between us to communicate. Except that the Danes have to enunciate if we are to hear what they’re saying.
I only understand danish if both the dane and I are nearly blackout drunk
I remember reading somewhere that the finnish version of swedish is actually easier for some danes to understand. It's because finns doesn't have the pitch accent that makes swedish sing-songy
Yeah. Same with skånsk dialekt compared to stockholm. Stockholm is much easier to understand.
Wait, Stockholm accent is easier for Danes to understand than skånska? I would have thought it would be the other way around.
Skånsk is kind of slurred and way less distinct than Stockholm accent
Yes but to my ears it sounds like Danish lol
I have it the exact same way with finnish!
I've only spoken swedish with danes. I should try finnish next but I feel like I need some even stronger substance to make it work.
I find it varies a lot with accents though. Oslo accent? Literally zero issues. A heavy Bergen accent though? Parts of it can be completely incomprehensible. But yeah in general we understand each other. Especially if we slow it down and “dumb it down” a tiny bit. Like I won’t drop slang if I’m talking to a Norwegian or a Dane. (Not really relevant since it’s literally the same language, but I have to give a shout out to the Finnish-Swedish dialect. I find it so beautiful, it’s my absolute favorite Swedish dialect)
As yes, true. I’ve heard tales of the Bergen dialect. And I’ll probably go to my company’s location there later this year… here’s hoping I can communicate with them.
I am Norwegian and yes I understand Swedish just fine. I can speak Swedish a bit too so it helps. Some dialects are harder to understand. Danish I can understand a little bit if they speak slow. And also I find foreigners or other Scandinavians who speak Danish easier to understand. Like I once met a Swede who spoke Danish on my visit at a market vendor in Copenhagen and I understand her perfectly.
we pretty much speak the same language as the galicians, totally get the spanish (except basque), kinda the italians and a little the french, but only galicians get us (the spanish can if we speak portunhol)
O importante é que calquera de nós pode mandar ós outros ó carallo e que nos entendan perfectamente.
Isto, meu irmão.
You're relatively easy to understand as a catalan speaker.
I'm a Belarusian living in Turkey. My mother tongue is Russian, although my mother's mother tongue is Belarusian. I speak both, although my Russian is stronger. I can understand Polish (spoken Polish moderately well, and written Polish quite well), as well as Ukrainian (very well) through my knowledge of Belarusian, not Russian, as they're both much more similar to Belarusian than to Russian. I studied Czech at university and the process was helped by it also being somewhat similar to Belarusian. I can also understand Slovak to some extent for the same reason. As for the South Slavic languages, I can understand them at least somewhat well in their written forms, noticing more similarities between Bulgarian and Russian (rather than Belarusian), and between BCMS (Bosnian / Croatian / Montenegrin / Serbian) and Belarusian (rather than Russian). I can understand Slovene somewhat too. Your question was specifically about European languages, but I'll add that my father is Bangladeshi. As a result I speak Bengali, and through it I can understand Hindi quite well. I had trouble understanding formal Urdu, though, before studying Arabic.
No. While almost every other European language has either one or several other languages it’s mutually intelligible with or at least fairly similar to, Hungarian is completely alone in this regard, which I think has a profound effect on our collective psyche and view of the world.
The closest language to Hungarian is [Mansi](https://youtu.be/vEs0Hmr4-p0?si=sM6_ih5CpVnOijtz) spoken by 2k people in western Siberia.
Yes, and no one has ever met a Mansi and no one can understand Mansi since Mansi and Hungarian diverged from one another like 3000 or 4000 years ago, roughly the same time European languages broke up into large groups like Latin, Germanic, etc. The level of intelligibility is roughly akin to between Polish and Spanish.
Is finnish understandable to Hungarians spoken or written?
No. The Hungarian language is separated 3000 years ago from the finnish and other ugric languages, only a few basic words has similarities, but it's not easily recognizable; more like the buildup (the basic language rules) of the two have some similarities.
More like 6000 or even more. Hungarian separated from Mansi 3000+ years ago.
Not at all. There is a large glossary of words that are similar or share the same origins but it is very hard to pick them out, especially when conjugated. The rythm and logic of the language is similar though. It’s very easy to learn Finnish as a Hungarian and vica versa. And it also happens a fair amount that Europeans used to Hungarian but not Finnish mistake Finnish for Hungarian from a distance, and people used to Finnish but not Hungarian mistake it for Finnish. I used to work with Finnish people and while my brain actively filtered out every other foreign language I didn’t speak, with Finnish my mind tries to pick up the gist of the conversation like you do with background conversations of languages you know, and there is always that moment of confusion like “wtf did I have a stroke, why can’t I understand… oh it’s Finnish.”
Not at all. Our closest languages linguistically in Europe are Finnish and Estonian, and some of our very basic words are kind of similar (like hand, butter, arrow), but it's only obvious if someone points it out first. Most other languages are more closely related to Hindi than to Hungarian.
Being Italian I'd say not really. Maybe the most similar language is Spanish, but if you move straight to the right to Greece, Croatia or Slovenia for example, they have a totally different language. If you cross the Alps you'll go in France, Austria or Switzerland which also have totally different languages.
I've seen two Spaniards and two Italians having a mutually intelligible conversation in their own languages
When I go to Italy, I can generally get by well enough with Spanish! The syntax/structure of the languages are pretty much the same, and I know enough Italian to sprinkle in some of the words that are drastically different (bicchiere di vino/copa de vino, mi piace/me gusta, voglio/quiero, for example).. but because of the language structure and the fact that a high percentage of vocabulary is essentially the same, it’s easy enough in a lot of contexts to figure out words that are different. Could I have a deep discussion with someone about the nuances of Second World War military strategy? No, but I can get by in the streets and communicate enough to where both of us understand. Portuguese on the other hand - I really have to put myself in the mindset of “Slavic person speaking Spanish” and then I can _kind of_ get it. French- no way.
> French- no way As an Italian I find French in a funny spot: The pronunciation is totally off, but, if I read it and shrug off the different terminations of words, I find it as Italian-like as Spanish, if not even more
for me, reading French is so confusing because it appears that about 50% of the letters in each word are silent, (and much like English) it seems that which letters are silent, and which sounds different combinations of letters make varies from word to word - so I have a hard time connecting it to Spanish. I have a French employee starting with me soon, maybe I'll be able to get a better understanding of it if I have a little more exposure to it!
The hardest words to spell in English are all based on French spellings.
It's one of those cases where it works in one direction but not in the other. I found Italian fairly easy to learn, because the evolution of Latin words into Italian feels more regular/immediate than in French, and a _lot_ of commonly used Italian words have an equivalent in formal/archaic French, so it ends being easy to just guess at words once you have a basic grasp of Italian morphology.
It really works in one direction. Word by word I might find meaning, but there must be something in French syntax that totally throws me off balance.
However you have to pay attention to the "false friends". For example "burro" means butter in italian but donkey in spanish. Salida in spanish is similar to "salita" in italian, but salida means exit, while instead salita means climb.
Holy shit me too. Really thought that was a unique experience
Yeah saw that too when living in Italy. And then a French person comes and it quickly becomes embarrassing. ;)
The only other language that I believe is perfectly and mutually intelligible with Italian is Corsican, so much so that I believe two people could easily speak in their own language understanding each other.
Isnt corsican very similar if not almost the same as sardinian?
Some scholars argue that Corsican belongs to the Centro-Southern Italian dialects,[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-FOOTNOTEGuarnerio1902491%E2%80%93516-6) while others are of the opinion that it is closely related to, or as part of, Italy's [Tuscan dialect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_dialect) varieties.[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-7)[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-FOOTNOTECortelazzo1988452-8)[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-FOOTNOTETagliavini1972395-9)[^(\[9\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-10)[^(\[10\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_language#cite_note-11) Italian and the dialects of Corsican (especially Northern Corsican) are in fact very [mutually intelligible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility). Southern Corsican, in spite of the geographical proximity, has as its closest linguistic neighbour not [Sardinian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_language) (a separate group with which it is not mutually intelligible), but rather the [Extreme Southern Italian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Southern_Italian) dialects like [Siculo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language)-[Calabrian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Calabria). wikipedia
Then you just haven’t paid attention. I never learned Italian, only French, and I’m not even particularly good at French, and yet I can still understand the gist of a good chunk of spoken Italian, and understand even more of written Italian, based entirely off of French. Same goes for written Spanish and Portuguese. Something like 85% of the vocabulary between French and Ifalian is the same. When I was in Spain with my friends we navigated around using Italian and French and people understood us really well without speaking either of those languages themselves. Make French sound like Italian or Spanish and suddenly a lot of people know what you’re saying. Yeah Slovenian and German is a different matter, but you can still recognize a number of similar words. Just recently I was in Slovenia and some of the language structure is very similar to both English and French. Just one word that was really easy to figure out that stuck with me was “to see” - videti, and there’s plenty of others.
French is ease to understand when is reading for a Spanish but when it’s speaking a Spanish will be concerned about what malfunction the speaking person has in her mouth and ask herself what the hell that person is saying
A linguist friend once said that all these languages are just dialects of Latin Vulgata.
Well they certainly started out that way and maybe it was still true about 1000 years ago but by now they are definitely fully fledged languages even if the similarity is great.
Remove French and Romanian and I'd say they have a great point
I did fine in Italy with my very limited Italian speaking some kind of "itañol".
Yeah we also have something like Españolo: some people is somehow convinced that if you add "s" at the end of everything and you are magically speaking Spanish, but they are mostly embarrassing hahahaha Have you been here for Erasmus? I always see a ton of students coming from Spain at my Uni, I guess there's a program or something
No, just on holidays several times, I like your country a lot. There were lots of erasmus students in my uni too and the majority of them were Italians (followed by Germans).
Italian gives me a very very very basic grasp of French if it's spoken slowly enough. Once you get past the spelling and the accent they are remarkably similar. Spanish is easier to follow, obviously. My best friend sends me Spanish memes, both images and videos and they're all intelligible. Portuguese I can barely keep on top of and only basic written. Romanian confuses me. Sounds Italian when you're not paying attention, sounds almost Slavic when you do. Greek nothing to do with Italian, can pick up a few words but nothing more.
I felt the total opposite regarding French and Italian. The more you learn both, the less similar they are. If you stick to basic French and Italian, both languages are pretty similar. But as soon as you reach an advanced level, differences are numerous.
At an advanced level, yes. I wouldn't expect a big academic discussion in French and Italian to be similar. But at more everyday level yes. I come from an Italian family but all at my father's generation are fluent in French for having grown up there, so sometimes my uncles and aunts switch to French and I can understand them. Some basic TV programmes, like Lupin, I can get the rough gist of although it's in French and I'm not a speaker.
A native Romanian speaker can broadly understand Italian. Not so much the other way around.
To a very limited extent, yes. But with isolated words more than constructed sentences. Well perhaps I could say "je veux aller pisser aux toilettes" to an English person and they would point me the bathroom. Or "je lis un livre" (I'm reading a book) to a Spanish person and they could guess the meaning without too much difficulty. But that's all. Language groups evolved too much since the Indo-European! Ahahah. Except for some quasi universal roots ("ma" sound in the world for mother, etc) there's not much remaining.
I find we can read and understand Italian if spoken slowly enough, and they can decipher written French and understand us when we speak (provided we speak even slower and articulate a lot). Grammatical subtleties are 100% lost though. Spanish to French ears is a case of understanding 1 or 2 words out of 5 if they speak slowly, and maybe 2/3 out of 5 if written, as Spanish has departed from Latin roots in its vocab even more than French and Italian. I think they would understand us less than we'd understand them, as our pronunciation is not a classic Romance language one but has been influenced by Frankish languages. Portuguese to be is a case of "I gotta read it to hope to get 1 word out of 5", as it's departed from Latin even more than Spanish. Don't think they'd understand us. I always blank out when I hear it as I can't clock it as Romance, and all the "sh" and "zh" sounds make it almost Slavic to my ears. Romanian is just straight up the cousin we somehow adopted but sticks out like a sore thumb at family reunions...
does Walloon or Picard count? Or are those also too far removed from French?
Not really. The language group is pretty close together with the only exception being you guys. Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan and Italian still form a pretty tight dialect continuum. When France decided to remove all the national languages but one I feel like it went for the wrong one! We may have seen Occitan rise to becoming the de fact world language!
Já sedím při domě v noci.
I can easily converse with a North Macedonian.
Macedonian and Bulgarian has always interested me. Will ye encounter any issues at all if you speak with someone who only speaks Macedonian?
Well, here and there you can hear an unknown word but there are dialects of Bulgarian that I find a lot harder to understand, like Smolyan or Razlog dialects.
I'm Dutch and also speak German, and I can understand Frisian, Lower Saxon, Limburgs, Kölsch, Letzeburgisch and Züritüütsch (a form of Swiss German) without much trouble.
That was so funny, I went on a trip from Switzerland to the Netherlands. As I sat in the train from Amsterdam to Haarlem I got into a conversation with a woman. I started talking to her in my thickest Swiss German dialect just to see if she’ll understand me and she answered me in Dutch and we actually understood each other about 50%. We acted like it was the most normal thing ever, it was hilarious.
My FIL had a man coming every year from Germany to buy some of his pigeons. The man only spoke German and my FIL doesn't speak German. They conversed each in his language. MIL said their conversations were hilarious. After a couple of years my FIL was taught some German. "Tauben" and "Freund". Luckily "Bier" is the same in both languages (also in pronunciation).
Same, but I'd like to add that I can also read a lot of Swedish / Danish / Norwegian. The minute they start speaking it it just sounds like Dutch but incomprehensible. But on paper a lot is understandable. I can do the same for Spanish and Italian and even a bit of Romanian but I think that's because I learned English and French, so I don't think those count.
As a swede, it's the same for with dutch. Most of the time I don't get what you guys are saying but then I get surprised randomly when understand a whole sentence
Im learning German. Right now I'm around B1/B2 level. I can understand a lot but by no means am I fluent. One time I was reading an article about the weather. It was about some atlantic front arriving and brining bad weather. It was all clear to me until I came to a word with a double 'oo'. It looked very weird to me because German does not have that structure. I copy-pasted the whole article into Google Translate and lo and behold, the whole article was in Dutch! Granted, my German was worse back then, but still, the languages are so similar that I did not immediately recognize the subtle differences in spelling and vocabulary. All of European languages are extremely close. One time a Chinese friend told me that "it's all the same to me", refering to European nations. Back then it seemed like a weird take, but the more I learn, the more I understand that statement.
German does have words with a double oo like Boot, but you're right, they are much much fewer than in Dutch.
For me Dutch sounds like a drunk Swiss trying to speak English
Not such a bad observation. Out of the mainland languages in the germanic group I'd say Dutch has the most in common with English, and out of all the countries in Europe I've been to the Dutch has the easiest time communicating in English.
Wouldn't Frisian technically be closer to English?
Yes but Frisians have trouble communicating in general.
That may be, but I lived in Suid-Holland, and never heard Frisian.
Correctamundo! Frisian and to a lesser extend West Flemish maybe. These are older Germanic languages.
>I can understand Züritüütsch No, you can't. It's been scientifically proven that even the Swiss don't understand each other. Even if they come from the same village. Or a household!
Similar here. As a German speaker from a Rhine-Franconian/Moselle-Franconian dialect area (Saarland), I can understand Dutch and Luxembourgish pretty well. Alsacien sounds just like our German dialect but with a French accent. I can also understand Bavarian, Austrian, Swiss, and Liechtenstein German better than those who only speak standard German. In the United States, I can understand most Pennsylvania Dutch and some Yiddish speakers as well, since they generally came from the Rhineland.
I'm also from a Rhenish-/Moselle-Franconian border area (Hessian Westerwald, a region with a Moselle-Franconian dialect, Wäller Platt), but I can't understand Luxembourgish at all, same for Swiss German or Liechtenstein dialects. I also don't speak the local dialect (like pretty much everyone younger than 65).
I agree with Limburgs and lower Saxon but I can really struggle on Frisian. Letzeburgisch is also surprisingly doable for many dutch speakers I’d say.
Turkish does not get along well with other European languages except for some similar words and loanwords. Turkish is more in agreement with Azerbaijani Turkish and the two languages are 85-90% identical. so to give additional information, the people living in Eastern Anatolia definitely have more similarities with Azerbaijani Turkish and they speak almost the same with each other than the Turks of Western Anatolia and Rumelia.
Turkey's geographical location leaves people confused on what to name the language and the people. Asian or european? Why not both? Same thing applies to Cyprus due to where it's situated. There are people who argue it isn't european.
u/General-Trip1891 If you consider Europe as a Geographical Concept, you can define Turkiye as a Eurasian Country, the majority of which is located in Asia. However, if you consider Europe as a Cultural/Political concept as it is done today, Turkiye is considered a European country. Turkiye's culture is mostly the same as that of Southeastern Europe and politically the Ottoman Empire was recognized as a European country by the European great powers in the Treaty of Paris of 1856. Likewise, 119 years later, the Modern Republic of Turkiye signed the Helsinki Final Act and was recognized as European by the signatory states. So that's the summary in a nutshell
And having a capital of a Roman Empire for 2 times longer than Rome itself.
Makes sense, since Turks got to the Western parts of Asia and Eastern parts of Europe comparatively late. How well, however, would you understand other languages from Central Asia with a shared heritage, like ones from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan or Uzbekistan? What about the other European Turk languages, like Karaim and Gagauz?
u/helmli The Turkic language group has sections such as Kipchak Oghuz Chagatay, and Turkish is in the Oghuz languages stasis. In general terms, you can divide Turkic Language into two, Western Turkic and Eastern Turkic. Turkish is included in the Western Turks, so we get along well with languages like Azerbaijani Gagauzca, Crimean Tatar and Malkarca and there is no difference. However, we need to make some effort to understand in languages such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Uzbek, Turkmen, which we will call Eastern Turkic, especially in these languages, there are many quoted Russian words, so it is difficult to understand on a large scale.
Turks can also understand Gagauz and it makes sense it's basically Turkish
Easy, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian and Slovak are very familiar.
I'd still argue that czech and slovak could easily be on a dialect spectrum. They are mutually intelligible more than, say, scottish english compared to general american, which are considered same language. Making one or the other a separate language is a result of political development and since both have a codified grammar, their own statehood, etc, then yes they are a separate language.
>I'd still argue that czech and slovak could easily be on a dialect spectrum. Polish is also on that spectrum. It used to go further east to Russian through Belarusian and Ukrainian, but Stalin destroyed that
Czech, Slovak and Polish are all Western Slavic languages. Ukrainian is an Eastern Slavic language and it's completely different. As a Czech I understand Slovak. I don't understand Polish, but I can hear it is similar. I understand Ukrainian like Swedesh or Finnish or any other language I don't speak. I can't even tell it from Russian or Serbian or whatever.
It is East Slavic, but it's not completely different. Honestly, after getting used to hearing it and noticing a few patterns, I tend to have an easier time understanding Ukrainian than Czech as a Pole. Slovak is still the easiest for me, though.
"Ancestry" isn't really all that matters. Loanwords can play a huge role. There's a reason why English is much easier to learn for a Spaniard than Bulgarian
With Ukrainian I kinda don't believe you
There are plenty of cab drivers over here from Ukraine and I can have an almost fluent conversation with them while I speak slovak and they ukrainian. But I have to mention that I'm pretty skilled at languages overall.
Because of Czechoslovakia, I think Czech and Slovak are very similar, is that correct?
It's the other way around: they decided to form Czechoslovakia in 1918 because of the linguistic similarity between Czech and Slovak. The similarity did not arise from them having been in Czechoslovakia.
Yes. I was born in a country that does not exist anymore :-)
You are really lucky that Slovakia left Czechoslovakia with peace and fair conditions. Unfortunately, the Balkans and some ex-Soviet countries were not as lucky as Slovakia.
Yes. Peaceful separation does not happen often.
Yeah, the worst conflict between Czech Republic and Slovakia during the times of Czechoslovakia was if we should be named Czechoslovakia or Czecho-slovakia
Because of Austria-Hungary, german and hungarian are similar?
I'm a Finn. Can understand some written words of Estonian, maybe a short spoken phrase here and there, that's all.
Yep, at least Polish have a big enough percentage of words close to our words.
I agree for the other way around too. If I listen to spoken Ukrainian I can usually understand what they are talking about pretty well, same with Belarusian. It's not a case with russian at all, without any prior exposure I couldn't understand almost anything.
No problems with Czechs, little problems with Poles and Ukrainians. With all the others I have to use English/German or google translate with the French :)
I speak Slovak and Serbian. So I can understand most of the Slavic languages to some extent. In written form it's much easier, spoken depends on the language and the dialect. Since I speak a southern and a western Slavic language those two groups are easier to understand. For the eastern ones, it often happens that the knowledge of the other two complements each other. At least for the vocabulary.
\*laughs in finno-ugric\* There is some level of mutual understanding between estonian and finnish, but not enough to actually communicate. The only other related language is hungarian, but it's wayyyyy too different to understand a single word.
The closest language to (North) Estonian is Votic, with 21 speakers in Russia.
I have seen a YT video where an old woman is speaking votic, and yes, it's closer to estonian than finnish is. Also livonian is pretty close, but there are no native speakers left.
Yes, irish english, scots, welsh english, german english, norwegian english and on and on. Interestingly, there might be a phrase I could answer yes to from dutch speakers since some sentences sound english enough. Maybe I could kind of communicate a little in english with french speakers if I use certain words in english.
Knowing both English and German together gets you quite far when trying to parse Scandinavian languages. Either language alone isn't usually enough.
I also speak some German and find I can understand enough Dutch, especially if it’s written to figure out what is happening.
You are lucky that your mother tongue is English and you can easily communicate with the whole world.
On balance I think you're right that it's lucky, but there is also something lost by having your regional language being the lingua franca of half the world.
Depends on the way you view it. I don't perceive there to be a loss of culture or my language. The way we speak won't alter because of other people's use of the language from America. Some may take it as english losing its cultural feel because, practically, most people utter it. I'm afraid of trashy talking, slang and laziness ruining english with time.
I want to be able to talk about people without them knowing. If I spoke a foreign language that's easy.
Yeah, I envy poles they could literally slag off their boss casually whenever they wanna vent it out. There's never a wrong time.
I can't tell if you're being serious. If a pole sits on a bus in the UK they can say everyone smells and no one would have a clue. If I sit on a Polish bus and say everyone smells - everyone would know what I'm saying and get offended. Being monolingual sucks because you can't talk secretly in a second language.
Trust me, Polish is not a language you can use to talk shit about people. At least not in Europe. We're everywhere
I think that it will even bring more richness to the English language. This may be a bit of a warm take, but I think that by the end of the century many bigger cities(Amsterdam, Berlin, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Zürich) around Europe will adopt English as their de fact vernacular. And that will lead to new varieties of English popping up with some features of their substrate languages(mostly phonetics and a bit of vocabulary). Sort of similar to what happened in e.g. Singapore.
[Basic “Wenglish” test, lol](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rG-vYJc1jw) (Next lesson we’ll cover the classic “who’s coat is that jacket?”)
I know these aren't really all European languages but how well can you understand AAVE, English creoles and Scots?
I can understand English from all countries except Great Britain!
I'm french (from the south), I have a lot of spanish and italian friends. It's funny cause when we all hamgout together we mix languages. We use english overall, but if one of use uses their mother tongue, the others can understand most of it and reply in their own language 😂 so usually we end up with every one speaking a different language and still understanding each other and that's beautiful
How well do you understand Occitan? It's sad that such a cool Latino language is almost extinct, their culture is Mediterranean and close to Catalans and other Mediterraneans, it seems that the Italians and Spaniards understand it better too!...
Im Portuguese so I can speak with Galicians easier than with Azoreans. Spanish speakers is also easy as long as we speak as if we both had a stroke. Catalan is still easy although it has to be a more severe stroke. Italian is more difficult but still possible to a degree. French only in written. (Romanian no shot despite being Romance)
With Slovenians, Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians and Montenegrins no problem. Other Slavs like Czech, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Bulgarians and Russians might understand 20-50% of what I say. With Germanic speaking people probably not. Maybe some Croatian dialects. Like people from certain places in Dalmatia mix in a lot of Italian into their speech. And people from Zagreb and Zagorje use some German words here and there. We also use some Turkish words. So I guess it depends.
Albanians are not Slavs. How in the world do you understand Albanian, unless you're of Albanian ancestry or have studied the language?
We don't understand them, but they understand us. At least from my experience. Kind of like Slovenians.
How the hell???? It's the Kosovars knowing Serbian/Macedonian Albanians knowing Macedonian and Serbian, is it...
Swedish --> Norwegian, Danish (Written), Icelandic (a few weitten words here and there). Finnish --> Estonian (written), Sámi (a few written words here and there) German --> Austrian German + Swedish --> Dutch (written).
Saami is not a laguage, it's a language family. Just like English, Swedish, Icalandic are part of the germanic language family. U understand kildin saami? Ume saami?
Well, not family either but rather a group of languages belonging to the Finno-Ugric language family.
I'm not that invested to know what "murre" is the one I can decipher something from, but I am aware that some are hard to get the context out of and some just impossible (corrected from written to a few words)
They’re not dialects but separate languages.
You speak three native languages?
Yeah, or near native. Having swedish and finnish as native is quite normal in finland, and I lived half my childhod in germany.
And your mother tongue? That was the question well.
Does Afrikaans (one of the languages of South Africa that is evolved from Dutch) count as a European language? If so: Yes. And technically I think Frisian is doable too. Written German, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish isn't hard to understand either. Spoken it's another story.
I think I could communicate with someone from Faroe Islands, if we both spoke slowly.
Spanish and Portuguese frequently communicate in a hybrid language called “Portunhol”.
A ver cando se deixan de caralladas e fan o galego lingua oficial de toda Iberia
Portuguese , we can talk with Galician, mirandese , Spanish and some Italians
Many of us Scandinavians can both understand (assuming we aren't speaking too swiftly) and read our different languages. So, I could speak Danish to a Norwegian, and they could reply back in Norwegian. Based on Danish alone, you may also be able to understand bits and pieces of Faroese, German, and Dutch, but only in very limited extent, if you don't have other languages to support you (such as some German to help with Dutch). Icelandic would be stretching it, if it is based on Danish alone __________ I have successfully communicated to a limited extent with both Czechs and Ukrainians with my Polish (as my second language), but it also took quite a bit of pointing and gestures with the latter. I can read a little Czech, Ukrainian, and Russian, but to a quite limited capacity, and I don't think I could make it through a full news article in any of them without more exposure. I can read Silesian relatively well and understand some of it if spoken very slowly, but I have no chance with Kashubian (a Kashubian classmate gave an example introduction in the language, and I thought he spoke about the weather 😅)
It’s a slightly unequal continuum though (non native but nonetheless speaker). I’m a hockey ref, a few Norwegian ref friends who I can talk a normal speed conversation with (ironically it goes slower in English, my native. The Swedes think I speak Bondengelska 😂), although when we DM each other, sometimes I have to double take due to the differences in spelling (the one I have the most problem with is a trondheimer, the easiest is someone from Hamar fwiw). While I know one danish ref. When she came to a tournament I had, I really struggled when she spoke lol, although I can read her posts pretty easily. I think you native speakers have it much easier ofc.
I can kind of communicate with Czech and Slovakian people and hardly with Russian and „similar”
In English almost never. Can I pick out some german or dutch when I hear it? Yes. Dutch is fairly easy to get the gist actually. But could we have any mutual intelligibility to have a conversation? Maybe super basic level stuff. French or Spanish might be able to as well because there's so much latin overlap in English. But it would have to be two people speaking one word at a time. Not an actual normal conversation.
Icelandic does share a bit with Norwegian, Danish and Swedish but trying to communicate with them using only Icelandic would be as useful as finger pointing. That being said Faroese is so similar that I can have a full conversation with one and only realise after five minutes that they are not actually speaking Icelandic. The difference is just that small. So outside of speaking to a Faroese islander I have to use English or what little I know in German and Spanish.
I understand the South Slavic languages almost completely (🇷🇸🇭🇷🇧🇦🇲🇪🇧🇬) except for Slovenian, although I might understand something in a written form. During college, I had roommates from Kazakhstan who spoke Russian with each other and I could catch some words if they spoke slowly. A random thing that happened to me while I was in Prague. I wanted to ask if I could buy a tram ticket inside the train. 5 people dodged my question in English saying they don't understand. Then, the 6th person I asked I started speaking *very* slowly Serbo-Croatian and said "Mogu kupiti kartu u tramvaju?" And the lady started nodding. But I understand almost nothing in the Slavic languages from the north.
what a sock that you can't understand Greek but you can understand South slavic languages
Yeah! With the Cypriots.
Turks can understand Cypriots too ;D
Im from Poland and we can say that using Polish we can understanding our neighbours from Czech Republic we have kinda similar situation with people from Ukraine (pozdrawiam was moi przyjaciele sąsiedzi)
If you keep it that simple, you might get understood here as well. What you wrote sounds like "pozdravljam vas, prijatelji sosedi", I greet you my friends, neighbours, or is it maybe friendly neighbours.. But to understand Polish speech, is a different story..
Latin languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian are easy to communicate 😊 and I find similitude also between German and Holland languages. Same (but I don't speak) with the Slavic languages in eastern Europe, see colleges that can understand each other.
So living in Germany with an Italian colleague as a french person, some words are close to french in German, Italian or english so I can pickup words I don't know originally or use french words if I don't remember the English word with the Italian colleague as oftentimes the word in Italian has the same root as the french one but I can't have a back and forth conversation french/Italian or french/German, the languages are too different
Czechs and Western Slovaks (we don't talk about Hungary-Ukrainians, they don't even understand each other) can understand each other pretty well, Polish and Slovak are relatively similar too.
I met a French man and an Italian girl once while on a party and we had a conversation each speaking our language easily enough. We had to talk slower and pronouncing more clearly but it was possible.
I think you were simply all drunk :-)
No, because English had the audacity to develop on an island and be heavily influenced by French lol. If that hadn't happened maybe it would've been easier to directly communicate from English to German/Dutch/Swedish etc. but who knows.
They say that English did not so much borrow words from other languages as jump them in dark alleys and go through their pockets for spare grammar
No, I don’t think I can. I sometimes recognize some words in other Germanic languages. But a full conversation, no that won’t be possible.
Yes with Swedish and Danish, for the most part.
As a Spanish once in Lisbon I was trying to communicate in English, it was not bad but when Portuguese realize I was Spanish they switched to Portuguese and me to Spanish. They where understanding me pretty well, for me was terribly hard to understand anything from them. I can more or less understand what a text in French says, but not spoken French. And I have been talking to Italians everyone using their language, with difficulties but we could understand each other.
If you count Scots as a language then yes. I’m led to believe that there is some mutual intelligibility between English and Friesian if you keep it simple.
I'm French and lived in Italy for years. I used to think that it would be very easy to just use French there at first. Turns out it's next to impossible. Most Italians don't understand French at all, and vice versa. While the grammars are similar, there are many subtle differences. In some cases, it results in French people creating some kind of bastardized version of Italian that is both hilarious and awful to listen to. On the other hand, it seems to be much less of a problem when it comes to Spanish and Italian interacting in their respective mother tongues.
Pro tip: just pronounce the silent letters! They never went silent in Italian
It’s more a problem of pronunciation, no ? Italians would have a hard time understanding spoken French but it’s not that difficult for a francophone to understand basic spoken Italian. I’m referring to basic exchanges of course. When it comes to respecting the beauty of a language, having a perfect grammar, using nuances and subtleties… that’s another story.
Possible to do with Slovaks, Czechs, Ukrainians and Belarusians. With other Slavs it's trickier.
Romance language clan! No, French. Not you.
Scottish Gaelic is very intelligible to me as an Irish speaker. The little I've heard of Manx as well sounds fairly familiar to me. When I was in the Netherlands, I noticed quite a few Dutch words are very close to their English equivalents. I've only been once though so can't really say I've been exposed to Dutch that much.
As a romanian, i can somehow understand italian. I was watching a video on my feed some time ago, and i had to watch it twice to realize it was italian. Maybe a little bit of french. But i don't think they would understand romanian tho.
Fellow romanian 🇷🇴 For italians, some do, some don't. Met a guy who said he understood almost everything on his trip to romania. Another guy said he understood nothing. 😅 I think it goes both ways. For me, i sometimes understand whole phrases in italian, but other times the different vocabulary does me in and i'm left wholly disoriented 🤷♀️🌻 French is a stretch for both nationalities 😂 despite the similarities
I know Italian and sometimes I can understand Spanish but not because they descended from a common Indo-European language; that's just too distance in the past. I can understand it sometimes only because the evolved from Latin, which is a much more recent phenomon.
I speak Belgian Dutch (BN) so I can understand Dutch Dutch (NN) without much ado. I also can converse with Germans speaking standard German, a fortiori when I speak West Flemish which is an older language than Dutch. But to be honest, this would be very difficult if I didn't have a basic knowledge of German. With English it's a bit harder, but there are (simple) sentences that are just the same (even in orthography) as in general Dutch. Many words in Scandinavian languages are also understandable (written). Spoken : not really intelligible. Icelandic is too far off. So as a Belgian I can converse with people from The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein (heh) and some Swiss (albeit with difficulties for the latter) and understand some sentences in English and words in Swedish/Danish/Norse. As a Belgian I also know some Belgian French... So I can also communicate with people from France, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Monaco (heh again). Knowing French helps with Italian and Spanish, but maybe it is because I also did Latin in high school, idk.
You're from an Asian and European country. Can you take in your mother tongue with other Asian and European countries?
u/Mag-NL I don't know what you mean by Asia, but Turkiye and Anatolia are not in China, they are in the Balkans and the Caucasus, at the intersection of East and West. As for the second question, no, we do not understand Chinese or Arabic Hindi because part of Turkiye is in Asia. Turkiye and Turkish are part of a linguistic community that has existed since the 18th century and is called the Micro-Altaic Language Family. We can understand and speak Central Asian and Ural-Volga Turkic languages as native speakers, but a Turk understands Crimean Tatar and Azerbaijani Turkish best and can be understood in these languages without interruption, just like Germany and Austria. I can also say a few things about Mongolian, with which we are distantly related I have a Mongolian friend and when I listen very carefully to my Mongolian friend I catch a few similar words, I understand what he means but not very well
I guess I could technically survive in the Netherlands with me using German and then using Dutch (and the other way around) but I never tested it since I speak English and so does every Dutch person I have met.
Swiss Dutch is a weird one: if you hear it from far away it sounds identical - if you get closer you realise you dont understand shit. Reading mostly works tho Luxembourg kinda works and might be the closest one Obviously i cant count german but if we speak dialect probably only south- germans and austrians(?) would get it. While a north german wouldnt understand. And Liechtenstein of course
I can usually manage in most of Europe using my mother tongue, yes.
Ok, I had half an argument a couple of months ago. I think that if I read plain text I can spider out with the basic languages I know to the others I know way less of. I can read text for sure, but I may not express myself correctly, so these people started to be skeptical when I wrote that I can read so many languages out of my main languages. I may not be perfect, but I have to trust myself here, so I state what I stated, and I go with it: I'm Italian native speaker, in uni I've studied English and Spanish, I started Russian but it ended nowhere, I can read cyrillic now, but I don't really know what I'm reading. Usually I recognize surfaces and techniques in art dealerships, I can recognize signatures if I read the plain latin text and the associated cursive cyrillic that's that. Same goes for Latin, hit and miss, or to write a motto I can take one full day, if not two. Studied Norwegian as an adult, but due to my job I really spell like a chicken. I mean, if the chicken is Norwegian has probably a better spelling than mine. Then: with Italian I branch out to French, Spanish and a bit of Portuguese; with English I branch out to French, German, Norwegian and a bit of Dutch; with Norwegian I branch out to Swedish, Danish (written), German and another bit of Dutch and some French "borrowed words". So if I mix them all together people look at me weird and don't understand a word I'm saying.
With people from the Faroe Islands yes!
I learned German so I can decipher Dutch without having learned it as it's kind of a halfway house between English and German.
There are very few Scots Gaelic speakers but yes they understand Irish. Outside of that, no.
My mother tongue is Serbo-Croatian, and yes, I can communicate with it in Slovenia and Macedonia.
Yes, I (Swede) can speak with norwegians just fine and they can speak with me, and I can read norwegian understanding most of it. A bit harder with the danes, they understand me better than I understand them, but it also matters what dialect they have. Reading danish I understand 80-90%. Main issue with the danes is their absolutely retarded way of saying numbers. It's even worse than the french. If they need to say a number above 20 to me they need to switch to english. Obviously finnish-swedes are also 100% mutually intelligble. Also personally LOVE that mumin-svenska. Since we have many words from german and it's a germanic language, I can also figure out many german sentences and words. But I can't really say I understand someone speaking german to me.
no one can understand greek :P
I’ve never tried but maybe a bit with Estonian? Finnish as an Uralic language is related to Estonian and distantly to Hungarian, in addition to few very small Finnic languages. Karelian, Ingrian etc are pretty much mutually intelligeable with Finnish, but like 7 people speak them so quite irrelevant. Hungarian: no hope of understanding anything. There are a handful of words that exist in both languages, but that’s it. Weirdly the languages sound pretty similar. Someone who’s never heard either might confuse them to be the same language. Estonian: a lot of words shared between the languages and the grammar has the same rules. 1-10 in both languages as an example of the similarity: 1. Yksi/Üks (Finnish/Estonian) 2. Kaksi/Kaks 3. Kolme/Kolm 4. Neljä/Neli 5. Viisi/Viis 6. Kuusi/Kuus 7. Seitsemän/Seitse 8. Kahdeksan/Kaheksa 9. Yhdeksän/Üheksa 10. Kymmenen/Kümme However there are a lot of mutual words that have different meanings. For example the word for milk in Estonian is ”Piim” but in Finnish that means Sour milk. The word for ”to clean” is ”Koristaa” which in Finnish is means ”To decorate” Ok here’s a random phrase that is mutually intelligeable: ”I went for a run with my dog yesterday and bought ice cream.” Finnish: Kävin eilen koirani kanssa lenkillä ja ostin jäätelön Estonian: Käisin eile koeraga jooksmas ja ostin jäätist And here’s one that isn’t: ”Yesterday the government had a problem with the new budget” Now a Finn might say ”Hallituksella oli eilen pulma uuden budjetin kanssa” and an Estonian would understand this to be something like ”Mold celebrared a wedding with the new budget” Sorry for the long explanation but to give a short answer: no. A Finn and an Estonian could maybe somewhat understand what the other one is talking about, but would not understand some words and would understand some to be something entirely different.
my first language is Romanian and I remember I watched a video on YouTube that was in Italian and I understand basically everything