What Is the Closest Language to English?
You have probably never heard of a language called Frisian. But of all the languages in the world, this tongue may be the closest language to English! Frisian is spoken in the region of Friesland and in the Frisian Islands. Friesland is a province in the northern part of the Netherlands. The Frisian Islands are a string of islan
There are three choices — Scots, Frisian and Dutch. The first reasonable candidate is SCOTS, that is “Lowland Scots” or “Ulster Scots” (to distinguish it from the Gaelic language known as Highland Scots). Many, however, simply treat this is a dialect of English. The next closest, and clearly a distinct language is FRISIAN, spoken by about half a million members of an ethnic group living on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. If that’s not a large enough group to count, you’d have to go with DUTCH. (Compare also Low German dialects in the Northwestern part of Germany, such as “Plattdeutsch”, and Afrikaans, which was originally a Dutch dialect.) To see in a CHART how Frisian, English.. Dutch (all West Germanic), etc. are related — (West Germanic: Anglo-Frisian, Old Dutch, Old High German) http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/lan…
