What other language is most similar to Spanish?
Is it Portuguese? Or Italian? Or someother one? Anyone knows? Thank you.
22 Answers
I was reading an article last night on Wiki:
Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%.[38] As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71%[38]): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% ? the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would.
Espero que sea útil.
I keep hearing Spanish speakers tell me Italian is easier to understand than Portuguese.
I agree with that, my vote goes to Italian. 
(as a side note, in Brazil we joke that to speak Italian all you have to do is speak Spanish and move your hands a lot. I guess Italian is closer to Spanish in sound, but I have no idea what Portuguese sounds like)
How could you be in Brazil and have no idea what Portuguese sounds like?
How could you be in Brazil and have no idea what Portuguese sounds like?
I meant I don't know what Portuguese sounds like to someone who does not understand it. I'm sure everyone has the same inability with their native language.
It's the same thing with accents. You can easily describe what characterizes a particular accent, but I doubt you can describe what's different about your accent. To your ears, people from your part of the country don't even have an accent.
I think it depends on who you ask and what you mean by similarity. When you compare written Spanish with written Portuguese and written Italian, Portuguese is definitely closer to Spanish (it has far more words in common). But while Portuguese speakers usually have no trouble understanding spoken Spanish, I keep hearing Spanish speakers tell me Italian is easier to understand than Portuguese. I have always been puzzled by that.
(as a side note, in Brazil we joke that to speak Italian all you have to do is speak Spanish and move your hands a lot. I guess Italian is closer to Spanish in sound, but I have no idea what Portuguese sounds like)
I have to say that Italian is closer to Spanish than Portugese.
1) I took beginning Italian in college after I had already taken 4 years of Spanish in high school. I easily got an A in the class by basically guessing the Spanish word for any Italian word I didn't know.
2) My wife is a native Spanish speaker and I have seen her have conversations with Italian tourists when we used to live in New York. They would speak Italian and she would speak Spanish. They both understood each other fine.
3) I was in Brazil earlier this year a couple of times on business trips and although I can speak Spanish and English fluently, I couldn't understand hardly anything they were saying. I sat at a business dinner for two hours and couldn't even follow the topic of the conversation in Portugese.
Lament for a Language
Below is a verse written by Jose dos Santos Ferreira, the most famous (and maybe only) poet of Macau's special language, patúa, with translations:
PATUA:
Língu di gente antigo di Macau
Lô disparecê tamên. Qui saiám!
Nga dia, mas quanto áno,
Quiança lô priguntá co pai-mai
Qui cuza sä afinal
Dóci papiaçam di Macau?
PORTUGUESE:
A língua da gente antiga de Macau
Vai disaparecer também. Qui pena!
Um dia daqui a alguns anos
A criança perguntará aos pais
O que é afinal
A doci lingua de Macau?
ENGLISH:
The language of the old people of Macau
Will disappear also. What a pity!
One day, in a few years
A child will ask his parents
What is it, after all,
The sweet language of Macau'
In my opinion it is Portuguese. I personally am able to better understand Portuguese when I hear it than when I hear someone speaking in Italian.
can I get a vote for english?????, with the addition of A or O there are a great deal of similar words
I say Italian. I hear Portuguese a lot, but I watched a Brazilian movie the other day and the language sounded more like French than Spanish.
Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian.... They are all pretty close in their own ways...
I personally always thought Portuguese was the most similar, but I can also tell you that Italian is pretty similar to Spanish. I was reading something the other day that had bits and pieces of Italian phrases, and I could pretty much understand them all. Then, the last two sentences (very short) were in Italian. I could understand the first sentence based solely on my knowledge of Spanish (if you had translated it into Spanish, it would have said basically the same thing). I couldn't understand the second sentence though... It was "too Italian" 
.
French is also similar to Spanish. I, of course, am taking Spanish at school. Some of my friends, however are taking French. I kind of want to learn French too, so I'm always trying to compare it to Spanish. I have a friend from Switzerland who is fluent in French and is taking Spanish. She said that knowing French kind of made it a little easy for her to remember some of the words since they were very close, but there are times when they are just completely different.
Just remember, all the "Romance Languages" branch off from Latin, so, though you may not be able to say exactly which one is the most similar, you can still say they are all pretty similar to the others.
I keep hearing Spanish speakers tell me Italian is easier to understand than Portuguese.
Heidita said:
I agree with that, my vote goes to Italian. wink
I agree. I choose Italian 
... but it seems that Spanish an Portuguese are on the same branch
Thought you might be interested in this complicated-looking diagram.
When I first read your question, I thought of Catalán, because, though I have never studied it, I can pretty much understand it by virtue of speaking Spanish (for perfect comprehension a dictionary would be necessary), but according to the diagram, it looks like Aragonese is closer. Leonese is also very close. As far as more major languages go, Portuguese is the closest. And, also, I can pretty much understand Portuguese if spoken slowly, too, and I don't suppose that qualification is really terribly scientific. I don't know about the others because I have never heard them.
I did a bit of research, and have drawn up a diagram for you. Well, I can't really draw a diagram with the formatting I can manage in the outrageous formatting scheme available here, but I will attempt to recreate the diagram for you. Here goes. Basically, the line starts like this, with other languages sprouting off the side, but I'll just show you the lineage of the languages in question. Latin to Vulgar Latin to Continental Romance to Italo-Western Romance to Western Romance. Then off of Western Romance you get two branches: Ibero Romance and Gallo Romance. Ibero Romance splits into Spanish and Portuguese. Gallo Romance splits into Occitano Romance and French, and Occitano Romance splits into Catalán and Occitan.
If that was all a bit of a blur, you can see a similar diagram here, which, by virtue of not being an image but a weirdo Wikipedia diagram, I was unable to reproduce here.
Update: Wow. Okay, well, that diagram is almost impossible to read, it came out so small. I'll leave it up for people with very good eye-sight though.
Spanish is a West Iberian language.
West Iberian is a branch of the Romance languages which includes Spanish, Ladino, the Astur-Leonese group (Asturian, Leonese, and Mirandese, (even Extremaduran)), and the modern descendants of Galician-Portuguese (Galician, Portuguese, and the Fala language). According to historical linguistic analysis, these languages are significantly closer to each other in historical terms than to any other living language in the peninsula — including Catalan, the other major Romance language of the Iberian Peninsula.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Iberian_languages)
Soy Español, y el italiano es más fácil de entender para un español que el portugués, por lo menos en el habla, por escrito no estoy seguro. El portugués es una variante del Gallego antiguo más que del Castellano.
