In spite of that, Scots has not disappeared but remains a vital part of Scottish identity. From here, English became the language of government and religion, and slowly also overtook common speech. Because of the political divide, Scots was the primary language of Scotland until the union of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. We can definitively say that English and Scots are very similar because they both developed from Old English (Anglo-Saxon). (It’s trickier than you would have thought, right?) In fact, according to a 2010 study by the Scottish government, 64% of Scottish citizens don’t consider it a distinct language.īefore we discard Scots entirely from the top of our list, it’s worth seeing for yourself if you think Scots is mutually intelligible with English. We say arguably as the language is often regarded more as a dialect of English than an actual language.
The closest language to English is arguably Scots. However, figuring out which language is closest is a little more complicated than you might think. It would be easy to think that English is closest to French, because of all the shared vocabulary, or German, since English is a Germanic language. Part of this is to blame on English’s complicated history - but i t’s also a greedy language that likes to pluck words from other languages to use as its own.Īll of these factors make it difficult to determine the languages closest to English. It rejects its own rules, makes exceptions for others and still experiences a great deal of infighting (looking at you, Oxford comma).
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