What language is closest to English?

What language is closest to English? Scots is, so close that whether it is a separate language is still argued. The closest language that is clearly separate is Frisian, spoken in the north of the Netherlands, which shares an ancestor with English that no other living language does. After those come Dutch and German. But closeness on a family tree is not the same as being easy to understand: in listening tests, English speakers with no experience of Dutch or German understood only about one word in ten.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 5 min read

The closest languages, at a glance

Scots: a sister language

Scots descends from the same early Middle English as modern English, and the two are, in Wikipedia's words, sister languages. In the 2022 Scottish census, 1,508,540 people said they could speak Scots, and about 45% of the population said they could speak, read, write or understand it.

Whether Scots is a language or a dialect of English is not settled, and the reason is the familiar one: "there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect". Many Scots speak along a continuum from Broad Scots to Scottish Standard English, so the boundary is drawn in the middle of people's speech. Scotland counts Scots as one of its official languages; many outside it hear it as English. The same argument, about a different language, is set out in is Shanghainese a language or a dialect.

Frisian: the closest relative

The Frisian languages are "the closest living language group" to English and Scots; together they make up the Anglo-Frisian branch of the Germanic family. West Frisian, the largest, has about 400,000 native speakers in the Dutch province of Friesland.

The family likeness shows in sounds that English and Frisian changed together and their neighbours did not:

And yet the modern languages "are not mutually intelligible". Frisian has spent centuries beside Dutch, and in practice it is now closer to Dutch than to English: its nearest relative on the family tree is not the language it most resembles today.

Dutch and German: what listening tests show

The best measurements come from the MICReLa project at the University of Groningen (Gooskens and colleagues), which tested how well young Europeans understand related languages when they hear them. Listeners heard short texts with some words replaced by a beep and chose the missing words from a list.

Three things stand out.

• English speakers understand almost none of their Germanic neighbours. Listeners who had little contact with the language got about one word in ten right, whether it was German, Dutch, Danish or Swedish. The study names English speakers listening to Dutch among its lowest results.
• German does better among all English listeners, at 27.7%, probably because some had studied it. Keep only those with minimal exposure and it falls to the same level as Dutch.
• The reverse is not true. Dutch and German listeners understood English very well, 94% and 86%, because almost all of them had learned it; the study could not find enough Dutch listeners of that age who had not, so the "minimal exposure" figure cannot be given.

The authors suggest about 40% as a rough threshold for two people to hold a conversation each in their own language. No Germanic language reaches it for English listeners without study. For comparison, Portuguese listeners understood 62% of Spanish with almost no exposure: see can Portuguese speakers understand Spanish.

Shared vocabulary: closer than it sounds

On core vocabulary, the basic words every language has, English and German share about 60%, by Ethnologue's method of comparing standard word lists. English shares 27% with French by the same measure.

That 27% understates what French gave English. About 28% of all modern English words came from French, and another 28% from Latin. The core vocabulary of English is Germanic, house, water, bread, mother, but much of its educated and abstract vocabulary is French and Latin, which is why a French or Spanish text can look more familiar to an English reader than a German one. How much of Spanish an English speaker already recognises is measured in Spanish words you already know.

Which is easiest to learn?

The US State Department's Foreign Service Institute, which trains diplomats, groups languages by how long they take an English speaker to reach professional proficiency. Its Category I, described as "languages close to English", includes Dutch at 24 weeks of full-time study, along with Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian and Portuguese (24 weeks), and French and Spanish (30 weeks). German is in Category II, at about 36 weeks.

So the language closest to English by family is not the quickest to learn. Dutch is rated quicker than German; French and Spanish, with their shared Latin vocabulary, are as quick as the Germanic languages next door. The full ranking is in the easiest languages to learn, and German's particular difficulties in is German hard to learn.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese to English speakers, free on the web.

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; PDF. Table 2, Germanic cloze test results, and the 40% threshold.
• Wikipedia: Scots language (sister language of English; 1,508,540 speakers in the 2022 census; the language-or-dialect question).
• Wikipedia: Frisian languages (closest living relatives of English; about 400,000 native speakers in Friesland; not mutually intelligible) and Anglo-Frisian languages (cheese, church, sheep).
• Ethnologue: Ethnologue 200, as tabulated in Wikipedia's List of languages by total number of speakers, for German's 76 million native speakers.
• Wikipedia: Lexical similarity, reporting Ethnologue's coefficients (English–German 0.60, English–French 0.27); English language (about 28% of words from French and 28% from Latin).
• U.S. Department of State: Foreign Language Training, read 15 October 2026.