Can Spanish speakers understand Italian?

Spanish speakers often say they can "more or less" understand Italian, and Italians say the same about Spanish. Both are right, but not equally, and "more or less" can be measured. This post brings together three measurements: a large listening experiment, a count of the words the two languages share, and the sounds that get in the way. Then it lists the false friends that make the overlap dangerous.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 6 min read

What a listening test found

The best numbers come from a European research project on mutual intelligibility (MICReLa), published by Charlotte Gooskens and colleagues at the University of Groningen. 1,833 young, university-educated listeners heard short texts read aloud in a related language, with some words replaced by a beep, and had to pick the missing word from a list. The score is the share of words they placed correctly.

Three things stand out. Spanish speakers understand spoken Italian better than any other language in the study, including Portuguese and French. The relationship is lopsided: Italians understand Spanish considerably better than Spanish speakers understand Italian, and that holds even for listeners who had barely heard the other language before. And the absolute level is modest. The authors suggest about 40% as a rough threshold for two people to hold a conversation each in their own language, and Spanish listeners with minimal exposure to Italian fall just under it. Their conclusion was that Italian and Spanish are the most promising pair in the Romance family for that kind of conversation — with effort.

Spanish was in fact the easiest language to understand for every group of Romance listeners in the study, so the high Italian-to-Spanish score is part of a wider pattern rather than something special about Italians. (Too few Spanish listeners had not studied French at school for the minimal-exposure figure to be measured.)

How many words they share

We counted identical spellings in two ways. Both are simple and both are reproducible from files in this project.

In speech. Among the 1,000 most frequent word forms of Spanish film and television dialogue (OpenSubtitles 2018), 118 are spelt exactly the same, accents included, among the 1,000 most frequent in Italian dialogue. Removing character names, English left in the subtitles and interjections every language spells alike leaves 99 real shared words; ignoring accents raises the raw count to 138. For comparison, the same count against Brazilian Portuguese gives 223 real shared words, and against French 42.

In our course lists. Taking the first 1,000 headwords of our Spanish list and of our Italian list, 96 are spelt identically (117 if accents are ignored). Across the first 5,000 of each, 401 are identical. These lists are built differently from the subtitle lists, so the two counts are not the same measurement, but they tell the same story.

So roughly one common word in ten is spelt the same — and far more are recognisable with a small change: Spanish noche and Italian notte, hablar and parlare are further apart, but tiempo and tempo, nuevo and nuovo, bueno and buono are close enough to guess. Identical spelling is a floor on how much is recognisable, not a ceiling.

The sounds that get in the way

The listening scores are lower than the shared vocabulary suggests, and sound is the main reason.

• Double consonants. Italian keeps consonants written double and holds them longer: anno (year) against Spanish año, sette (seven) against siete. Spanish has almost no long consonants, and a Spanish ear does not expect the difference to carry meaning.
• Seven vowels, not five. Italian distinguishes an open and a closed e and o in stressed syllables; Spanish has 5 vowels and hears Italian's 7 as its own five.
• The same letters, different sounds. Before e and i, Italian c is the English "ch" and g the English "j": Italian cena (dinner) sounds like "chay-na", where Spanish cena is "thay-na" in Spain and "say-na" in the Americas; Italian gente (people) begins with an English "j" sound, Spanish gente with the rasping j of jota.
• Plurals by vowel, not by -s. Spanish marks almost every plural with -s: casas, libros. Italian changes the final vowel: case, libri. A Spanish listener loses one of the most frequent signals in the sentence.

Reading narrows the gap: written Italian is much easier for a Spanish speaker than spoken Italian, because the spelling shows the shared words that the sounds disguise.

The false friends

The shared vocabulary has traps, and some of them are common words. Each rank below is the word's place in its own language's subtitle list, where 1 is the most frequent word:

A few of these are the classic jokes between the two languages — a Spanish speaker asking for burro in an Italian café gets butter, not a donkey — but the most important are the common ones. Pronto is among the few hundred most frequent words in both languages and means "soon" in one and "ready" in the other. Salir and salire look like the same verb and go in different directions.

So can they?

• Reading: largely yes, with a dictionary for the false friends.
• Listening: partly. In the best available experiment, Spanish listeners with minimal exposure to Italian placed 38.2% of the missing words, just under the level the researchers consider workable for conversation.
• Speaking: no. Speaking Spanish slowly at an Italian is not speaking Italian, and the false friends guarantee some memorable mistakes.

For a Spanish speaker, Italian is one of the fastest languages to learn, because the grammar and a large share of the vocabulary are already familiar and the work is concentrated in the sounds and the traps. Is Italian hard to learn covers it from an English speaker's side, and Portuguese vs Spanish makes the same comparison with Portuguese, the other close neighbour. The Italian course teaches the language from its most common words up, one lesson a day.

Sources

• Gooskens, C., van Heuven, V. J., Golubović, J., Schüppert, A., Swarte, F. & Voigt, S. (2018). Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe. International Journal of Multilingualism 15(2); published online 2017. tandfonline.com, open access PDF. The figures are from its Table 3, the spoken cloze test in the Romance group.
• Wikipedia: Italian language — the seven-vowel system and preserved double consonants (anno against Spanish año); Spanish phonology.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The overlap counts and ranks are computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py; the false friends and their meanings are written by hand in scripts/frequency_extras.py, checked against both course lists.