ClosestToFrench

What is the closest language to French?

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Uri Granta, interested in languages

Updated May 2, 2015 · Upvoted by Dan Lenski, BA in Linguistics and worked in the speech synthesis indust…

• The closest overall is one of the other oïl languages such as Picard (spoken in Picardy) or Jèrriais (spoken in Jersey). 
• The closest national language is probably Catalan (official in Andorra as well as in some regions of Spain). I'd previously suggested Romansh (spoken in parts of Switzerland), though I think Catalan is actually closer. 
• The closest widely spoken language is definitely Catalan (spoken mainly in Spain by around 5 million speakers). 
• The closest major international language is probably Italian. I'd previously suggested Spanish, which is more closely related genealogically, but Italian has a higher lexical similarity, making the written forms at least more mutually intelligible. I couldn't find details for spoken mutual intelligibility or phonetic similarity, so it's possible that Spanish still wins out there. (Thanks Davide Sestili for suggesting I look at this.)

Update: Brais Martinez comments that the normative reform of contemporary Catalan at the beginning of the 20th century (spearheaded by Pompeu Fabra) actually drove Catalan closer to French than it had previously been.

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Lucy Alexanyan, Speaks 3 languages fluently. Learns 2 more

Written Apr 25, 2015

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