The Mutual Intelligibility of the Romance Languages and English
from a Comparative and Sociohistorical Perspective
Abstract
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
1. English, the Romance languages, and the world
The current distribution of the Indo-European languages within Eurasia
Eight out of the ten most spoken languages are a part of the Indo-European language
family, three of which are Romance languages, and the most spoken language being none
other than English. Nearly half of the world’s population (c. 3.2 billion) speaks an IndoEuropean language as a first language, and an even larger percentage of the globe speaks
one or more as second languages.1 Starting with the spread of the hypothetical Proto-IndoEuropean language within prehistoric Europe and Asia, and then the expansion of English,
Spanish, Portuguese, and the like to overseas colonies and territories during the modern era,
the Indo-European languages, especially the Romance languages and English, have become
an integral part of society around the world. English is practically the lingua franca of the
world, with almost everyone outside of the Anglosphere learning it as a second or third
language. Meanwhile, Spanish, by far the most spoken Romance language, has an entire
continent (excluding Brazil, which speaks another closely related Romance language,
Portuguese, and a few other smaller countries) speaking it as a result of Spanish
colonization in the last millennium, with more and more foreigners seeking to learn the
language to work with the ever-growing states of Latin America. Aside from these two, the
other languages such as French and Portuguese have also been growing in use, making them
arguably the most important languages of the world.
2. The genealogy of English in relation to the Romance languages
It is often confused that English is directly related to the Romance languages or even
a part of the family because of their linguistic similarities. Many English speakers will notice
in their daily lives that when they come across a random phrase or sentence in one of the
languages, most of the time Spanish for Americans because of its significance as the second
most spoken language in the United States,2 they can make out some of the words and guess
1
2
Ethnologue (2021)
Language use in the United States (2019)
their meanings but not fully understand the expression entirely without prior knowledge of
it. This goes as far as to some English users without a background in linguistics making the
judgement that it is a close relative to Spanish, closer than languages such as German or
Dutch that are actually in the same branch of the Indo-European family as English. The fact
is that you must climb all the way up the family tree back to the fabled Proto-Indo-European
language to find a point their lineages intersect. At the same level that Spanish is a Romance
language, English is a West Germanic language, which in turn is a branch of the Germanic
languages. Meanwhile, the Romance languages are a part of the Italic languages. And finally,
the Germanic languages, Romance languages, and six other branches make up the IndoEuropean language family as a whole. F
IndoEuropean
Germanic
English
Italic
West
Germanic
North
Germanic
German
Dutch
LatinoFaliscan
Romance
Spanish
Portugues
e
Albanian
French
Italian
Latin
Armenian
BaltoSlavic
Celtic
Hellenic
IndoIranian
References
Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2021. Ethnologue:
Languages of the World. Twenty-fourth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online
version: http://www.ethnologue.com.
Jensen, John B. “On the Mutual Intelligibility of Spanish and Portuguese.” Hispania, vol. 72,
no. 4, 1989, pp. 848–852. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/343562. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
"Table 53. Languages Spoken At Home by Language: 2017", Language use in the United
States, August 2019, U.S. Census Bureau, retrieved February 19, 2016