Is English Really a Germanic Language?

Today we delve into the history of the English language and look at the Germanic, Romance, and other influences that have shaped the Modern English of today.
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@4:39 to 4:50 there's an error: the text should say "Middle English" not "Modern English". Both are true, but at that moment I'm talking about the changes from OE to Middle English.
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**Clarification regarding the word "in":
A lot of people have commented saying that "in" is of Germanic origin, which matches what I had previously thought. When researching this video I looked up the etymology of "in" and read that it's of Latin origin, meaning "into, in, on, upon". So I thought that it must have been one of the early borrowings into Germanic dialects that I mentioned in the video.
But I went back and checked the source again, and I realized that the dictionary entry I was reading was for the PREFIX "in－", not the standalone word. The standalone word has always existed in the Germanic language family. And ultimately, both the Germanic and Latin words come from the Proto-Indo-European word "en".**
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[Langfocus]

A lot of people have commented saying that "in" is of Germanic origin, which matches what I had previously thought. When researching this video I looked up the etymology of "in" and read that it's of Latin origin, meaning "into, in, on, upon". So I thought that it must have been one of the early borrowings into Germanic dialects that I mentioned in the video. But I went back and checked the source again, and I realized that the dictionary entry I was reading was for the PREFIX "in－", not the standalone word. The standalone word has always existed in the Germanic language family. And ultimately, both the Germanic and Latin words come from the Proto-Indo-European word "en".

[notonlysunandbeach]

...and "en" is used in spanish for the same purposes, but sometimes with modifications.

[Thomas]

In is Latin: "Iulius est in tablinum" - "Julius is in the study"

[Df Jl]

thanks! i love to be right lol

[Axel Palmér]

Actually, "tablinum" should take the ablative "tablino" here.

[いちご・くん]

Thanks Paul, yeah I did find it strange when you said this simple preposition was of Latin origin as these basic words are almost entirely of Germanic /OldEnglish origin.

[Matthias Perktold]

As a native german speaker, English feels much closer to German than e.g. Italian, both in vocabulary and in grammar and phrases. When translating German to English, you can often get away by translating word for word and maybe reordering them, whereas for Italian, you often kinda have to recreate the sentence from scratch. So English being a germanic language makes totally sense to me.

[Nunya Biz]

And then there’s Anglish, which literally sounds like German but smoother …

[vincent Lefebvre]

In vocabulary english is much closer to french. Wie viele Sprachen sprechen Sie ? Ich spreche fließend Französiche und Englisch. Glauben sie mich.

[Vovk]

But what about ther typical German grammatic contruction that the verb comes in the end of a sentence? Totally impossible in English. Which is why a word-to-word translation from French makes more sense.

[DezRav668]

I mean probably for some people it might be Germanic, but still feels "way less Germanic" than when reading or hearing something in German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Dutch. At least from a romance speaker perspective.. the amount of cognates in English from a romance speaker perspective is just ridiculous.. and the grammatic is just extremely simplified..

[vincent Lefebvre]

@Vovk ....and the past participle precedes the auxiliary !

[Benjamin D.]

I'm a french person who learned English and German. My experience is that learning English was tough as a start because there was so many new words to learn but after reaching a certain level (B1) it becomes really easy. I suppose it's because most complicated words in English come from latin or french. My experience with learning German is the opposite: the basic vocabulary is easy since it resembles Englisch. However after reaching B1 everything becomes so much harder. At this point I have to learn every new word without shortcut... So I 100% agree: English feels very Germanic in it's basic structure. French words seem to have been added on top to sound fancy.

[adolfo rodolfo]

I am an English person who learned French and German. My experience very much mirrors yours. I didn't learn them in the same depth; I studied French through university and am more or less bi-lingual, whereas I studied German just for three years at school and that was fifty years ago now. But your experience is fundamentally the same as mine: the beginnings of learning German were easier than the beginnings of learning French, because of the similarity of the German and English words. But then, when you move into "higher" studies, with a focus on literature, French is much easier to read than German because, as you move from everyday language to more elevated, formal language, the English vocabulary gets ever closer to French/Latin and ever further away from German. One thing that doesn't change though is the structure/grammar - that is still Germanic however Romance the vocabulary becomes.

[Laura]

Definitely. I'm Spanish and Catalan speaker and my sensation is that at first is really far away from my latin languages, but now I am studying C1 english level and the vocabulary is very identical to latin words. Verbs have also the same structure of times as a latin language, only that is studied in another way.

[adolfo rodolfo]

@Laura I'm surprised that you say that English verbs at times have the same structure as a Latin language - they are much closer in structure to German verbs. In particular, in English and other Germanic languages, the future and conditional tenses are formed with an auxiliary verb plus the infinitive, not by changing the ending of the verb; strong (i.e. irregular) verbs in English work in the same way as strong verbs in German - if fact they are usually the same verbs and irregular in the same way. There are several other similarities too. The conjugation of verbs in English has simplified a lot over the centuries; if you go back to the English of Chaucer (late 14th century), the similarities between English and German verbs are very apparent.

[Laura]

@adolfo rodolfo Only Search "Verbo Haber conjugación" Haber (Spanish) = Have (English) and after a little study you'll see that it is the same. Only that in English don't study in the same way. For instance, the Present conditional in English is "Would + verb in infinitive" like "would go", or the Present of the subjunctive is "I hope I have something". Moreover, when in Spanish we say "yo he ido", we are saying "I have gone". So in both cases, we say "have+past participle", and this structure of Present Perfert is in all Latin languages but with another name. Thus, in English, the verbs have the same word for many subject pronouns but with the same time structure as Latin language verbs.

[adolfo rodolfo]

@Laura I don't argue that the perfect tense structure is not similar between English and Latin languages, but it is also the same between English and the Germanic languages such as German and Dutch. If anything you would assume that the Latin languages have adopted the Germanic way of forming the perfect tense, since classical Latin itself did not form the perfect tense in this way (I don't actually assume this myself). What is more significant is the way that English forms the future and conditional tenses and the similarity between the strong (irregular) verbs in English and the other Germanic languages. Other similarities you may see, for example, between pronouns are to do with the common Indo-European root of European languages - English pronouns are much closer to Dutch/German ones than to any Latin languages. As for the subjunctive, we don't really have one in English, not anymore, it fell out of use centuries ago; it is only retained in a few set expressions. There really is no debate on this; English is a Germanic language - but one that, now (not always in the past) has a lot of Romance words in its higher vocabulary (not so many in the words we use most of the time when speaking)

[Jose Amate García]

For a Spanish, to learn Portuguese, Italian or even French is like to walk along a path, but to learn a Germanic language is like to jump a big wall, English has the smallest wall, but still a wall.

[Blas Payri]

I agree

[Kelli *******]

I am a native English speaker and I have studied Latin, German and some Portuguese and I must say Latin and Portuguese were much more difficult for me than German.

[Paul Ashford]

As a native English speaker, I learnt Spanish fairly easily, because of the enormous amount of Latin words in English maybe, but also can understand Italian and Portuguese pretty much cos of Spanish. But the Germanic languages are more difficult for me. Now according to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of languages, the closest language to English is now Italian, taking all aspects of language into account.

[Jose Amate García]

@Paul Ashford there are a couple of hard things in English for a Spanish speaker, for example, the vowels, we have five of them, but there are 12 in English, I can not notice the difference between, ship and sheep, sheet and shit, but and bat, cut and cat, etc... and I know, for you the difference is clear, another thing are the phrasal verbs, tell me the true, English invented them for no Spanish could speak English. Didn't you?

[FenriZz]

AJAJA si creo

[K. Tanaka]

I'm a Japanese who have studied Chinese. I think English is still one of the germanic languages, because I impassed your opinion that there are more Latin words in English news papers than just in the usual conversation. It is exactly the same case as quite a few of Chinese words in Japanese. There are a lot more Chinese rooted words even in Japanese academic words comparing to it. However, Japanese is a still Japonic languages rather than Sino-Tibetan languages, because their basic grammars and pronunciation are completely different each other.

[vincent Lefebvre]

Do not confuse latin and french.

[ryuzaki]

True

[Pale Pilgrim]

@vincent Lefebvre Why not? French is just Vulgar Latin with a ton of Frankish loanwords.

[vincent Lefebvre]

@Pale Pilgrim Tu sembles être un expert linguiste ? Jusqu'à quel point fais-tu la différence entre le latin et le français ? Le parles-tu d'abord ? Moi j'ai étudié le latin durant quatre ans et je suis parfaitement bilingue. De plus je parle un peu allemand. Très comique de voir à quel point les anglophones réagissent très mal lorsqu'on leur souligne à quel point leur langue contient un nombre ahurissant de vocabulaire français. Des mots venus DIRECTEMENT du français et non du latin. Hormis le français le latin a donné naissance à un grand pourcentage de mots de la langue anglaise, ceci en bonne partie due au clergé. Use google translation.

[adolfo rodolfo]

@vincent Lefebvre You seem to have a strangely nationalistic view of language. All the Romance languages are derivatives of Latin. As "pale pilgrim" says, French is a mixture of vulgar Latin and Frankish loanwords. You can find many books written by expert linguists (French ones at that) documenting how French developed from Latin. I am an Anglophone, English to be precise, I don't have any problem with the French language either - I love it and have devoted many years of my life to studying it. I don't react badly at all when somebody points out that modern English contains a huge amount of French/Latin vocabulary; it would be ridiculous to react badly to a clear, undeniable fact; and I'm not nationalistic about language, I don't think that English would be improved if it were in some way "purified" by purging it of Romance derived words and replacing them with Germanic equivalents (there are some weird people who actually advocate this). I do react to people who claim that English is in some way a Romance language derived from French, but not with hurt nationalistic pride, simply with amusement at their linguistic ignorance.

[J Dane]

I definitely see English as a Germanic language. I learned French after English as a child but never mixed them up. I learned German as an adult and the two seem to mix to me, the structure somehow was familiar. I learned it way faster despite the declensions and complex plurals. It just made more sense.

[YY]

Its propably because of the huge influence of Latin and French in the German language too.

[J Dane]

@YY It's definitely there. Words like "probieren" from Latin "Probare" to test. Of course now the word favored is "testen" .

[YY]

@J Dane Thats not quite true. Probieren means: to try, while testen means: to test. The word "test" was borrowed from the English language to the German however the origin of the word was French. German is my main language btw.

[J Dane]

@YY When I studied German years and years ago, the word "testen" wasn't in our considerable vocabulary (mostly in books.) Things change in language.

[Mária Mellius Falkenhayn]

Agreed

[Fergus 13]

Being a romance language native speaker, I'd say to me English always felt 99% germanic, despite the immense amount of non germanic vocabulary, due to structure, rhythm and pronunciation.

[Siriema Pantanal]

Wrong. The English language is not even a flexive language like the German and it has about 80% of the vocabulary composed of words of Latin origin. How do you say that this language is 99% Germanic? It is not even 10%.

[Siriema Pantanal]

It seems you have no idea what you are writing. First: the Germanic languages are flexive language, the English language is not; second: the German language has declination, direct influence of Latim, the English language, not; third: the German language has gender, the English language, not. fourth: the alphabetical pronunciation of the German language is completely different from the English language. Define Romance language, please. I think you mean local dialects with elements of Latin like the English and German languages. Did you know that Britain and Germany were also Roman colonies for more than five centuries like all those countries that many ignorant people call "Latin countries"?

[Luffy PirateKing]

@Siriema Pantanal Lol you are Indian what do you know

[Siriema Pantanal]

@Luffy PirateKing Indian, me? What ignorance. Siriema is a bird and pantanal is the place in the American continent where this bird inhabits.

[John Hazlett]

Spanish has 5 vowel, and a couple of dipthongs. French is a hair more complicated. But English has 13 vowel sounds if I remember correctly. Spanish is almost perfectly phonetic, it's pronounced how it's spelled, but English can drive even native speakers crazy. English Grammer is more similar to German, and the word order in Spanish is often different.

[Eq_NightGlider_]

English has 20 vowel sounds if you include diphthongs. And 24 consonant sounds.

[jazz winning the chip]

When it comes to word use, all the romance languages are anything but simple compared to English. To put us short, the just stays the in English so English as an entry point is bit easier then even Spanish (learning a language is hard regardless)

[Miguel Sotillo]

French has 16 vowel sounds

[Eq_NightGlider_]

@Miguel Sotillo French has 12 according to Google

[Miguel Sotillo]

@Eq_NightGlider_ Yes because google is never wrong lol! Do a better check, there are 16 including the nasal ones.

[Ezequiel Gerstel Bodoha]

I've learned german after learning english, and I can confirm that in the practice, you can notice that both are germanic, the structures but also the vocabulary. Also it is easier for germans to learn english as for an spanish native speaker

[Daniel Elliott]

Absolutely this. Once you get more into other Germanic languages you can see why it’s still classified as Germanic. I also have been learning German and they sound so much alike in their structure. It’s truly fun to experience.

[KrazoanSpectre]

Native English speaker who is learning some Norwegian for fun and an enthusiast of Old English/Old Norse: English at its core is still Germanic I feel. I am picking up Norwegian at a rather alarming rate due to the similarities that the languages clearly share. This goes not only for vocabulary similarities, but also in most sentence structure at their core. With a little work, you can also find much of our everyday speech can be found in Old English passages if you look for it.

[Jayden Mae]

For real. Some people think English is actually a north Germanic language, bc of its grammatical similarities to Norwegian

[Cryf]

I'm so glad I saw this, because I've had an eerily similar experience with Danish.

[Claude van Kloten]

Norwegian was heavily influenced by Low German because of the Hanseatic League and later trade relations and German settlement in Norway.

[Rahul Shinde]

I would definitely rate English as a Germanic language. I learnt English in school and have done all of my education till Graduation in English. I started learning German in my Bachelor's and could immediately see similarities in frequently used verbs (haben, bringen, essen, rennen, schwimmen), prepositions (auf, an, mit, über, unter, hinter) and personal pronouns (ich, du, wir). The conjugation of verbs and adjectives according to gender was a bit painful but I could pick up the basic language in about 8-10 months, enough to have some fundamental conversation (I spoke with a customs official with 8 months German practice). Now after 18 months I can read Newspapers and get the basic gist of the article. I don't get all of the vocabulary in the newspapers because most of it is constructed by German words and there is little borrowing from Romance languages. However, after a while you get the hang of it. So, yeah I would agree with you that English is a germanic language with a massive Romance vocabulary. As a result I have to learn new words for simpler words in English (Science = Naturwissenschaft, Hospital = Krankenhaus, Health Insurance = Krankenversicherung) :p

[Ιουδαιοχριστιανός]

English at its core is Germanic. It is mixed with many Latin, French, Norman, and Greek terms, but it originated as a Germanic language.

[The Brute :]

It's impossible to form a sentence in modern English using romance words only, but yet you can form simple sentences using Germanic vocabulary only

[Mistérios Resolvidos]

is (latin), impossible (latin), form (latin), sentence (latin), in (latin), modern (latin), using (latin), romance (latin), form (latin), simple (latin), sentences (latin), using (latin), vocabulary (latin).

[The Brute :]

@Mistérios Resolvidos Sorry, wrong! ;-) you'r almost right except it’s = it is = es ist = = het = hita = Hit = sin = got = wean = bjiu = Old/Proto Germanic Old Frisian, in = in, into, upon, on, at, among; about, during = Middle English / Proto Germanic Old Frisian, as mentioned, it's impossible to form a proper sentence in English without Germanic words

[Mistérios Resolvidos]

@The Brute : I had my doubts, but as in Latin, "is" is "es" or "est", and "in" is the same, in Latin: "in"

[NicoUndSo]

@Mistérios Resolvidos Yes it's the same in latin but it comes from proto Germanic🤦‍♂️

[NicoUndSo]

@Mistérios Resolvidos Just because something is similar to that from Latin doesn't mean it doesn't come from Germanic. 80% of the most used words are of geemanic origin. the core words are all germanic

[Charlie Shaw-Pentek]

I was practically under the illusion for most of my life that English was a romance before i even knew anything about languages, because I was told in school that English comes from Latin, which i think is a very common misconception. It's obvious to me that English is a Germanic language, the cause of the confusion is that the similarities to romance languages are more immediately obvious to people who don't know what to look for when spotting similarities in languages. English, Spanish and French would only be similar when looking at the words they have that come from Latin, words like Hospital (English/Spanish) and Hôpital (French), compared to Krankenhaus (German), it might seem based on those words that English is more similar to Spanish and French than German, leading to the conclusion that it might be a Romance Language. However, when u look at the fundamental pillars of those languages and the linguistic rules, u start to see that English is actually more like German than Spanish and French, and obviously English and German are both descended from Proto-Germanic, whereas Spanish and French are descended from Latin, English only sounds so much like Spanish and French because it has so much Latin influence, and French also has a lot od Germanic influence and English has a lot of French influence and to further add to this, all of thise languages are Indo-European, so they're bound to have some similarities along the way, but that doesn't change the fact that English is 100% a Germanic language

[olivier legendre]

The basic grammar words and vocabulary are predominantly Germanic. But do you want to make do with only 500 words ? As you expand your vocabulary you will realize that French and Latin become more and more important. Just with your commant you could classify your words in each category : Germanic or French/Latin ? I don't have time but I propose you do. Just for a start: GERMANIC: I, was, under, the, for, most, of, my, life, that, English, a, before, even, knew, anything, about FRENCH/LATIN: practically, illusion, Romance, language A language is whole : you need the grammar structure, the vocabulary, everything ! Also as an exercise you could translate your comment in German and French and see which translation retains the most original text (single occurences, not the 20 "the", "in" etc.).

[Pepe]

The influence is still pretty big, considering that there are more latin words, mostly used in advanced/fancy english, but nonetheless words than original anglo saxon

[linear_regression]

I'm a Spanish speaker, but I must say that I'm totally in love with the English language. What a beautiful language!

[Jay Peters]

Really? I find so many other languages much more beautiful sounding than English. We sound stuffy....especially the ACTUAL English people 😆

[Willow]

@Jay Peters no, English is beautiful

[Jay Peters]

@Willow well, yeah I'm not gonna lie, I find certain English accents pretty sexy. Kate Beckinsale for instance, hot with a posh kind of accent. Aiyeee aiyeee......😅 sweatin' a little over here. But I'm Canadian so our accents are pretty lame, eh.....you know what I'm talking aboot. Must be our garbage pail heads 😂

[jw31]

@Jay Peters english has so much dialectal variation that some accents sound really cool while others sound ugly. Imo the general american and canadian accents sound bad while the boston, new york, and certain london accents sound pretty neat. Southern american accent also sounds awesome.

[Elena Mancheva]

I'm currently learning German and knowing English helps so much with it. Many words are similar enough to understand. Often if you just sound out the word you can see it's English equivalent. And not just words even prepositions and other particles it's very clear they had a common ancestor. And just the sounds English has sound Germanic idk how to explain it. I've never learned a romance language so i can't compare but i feel like you wouldn't find that many similarities even if the majority of english words come from french or maybe you'll sturggle to see the connections

[Bernadette Coombs]

From my own experience, I had a few lessons of German, and a several more lessons of Spanish, I also browsed some French literature as well, as I find that many of the words in English relate to all of these other languages I mentioned. This guy is right when he showed the differences between French and German, I do find French much easier to read than German. So, my conclusion is; English is a mixture of the two linguistic branches, Romance and Germanic.

[Andrew Diprose]

exactly. And I am a bilingual English Italian person

[John Gosling]

We have to remember that English as spoken in the 21st century, and probably also for the last thousand years, is not one language but two: the 'educated' language and the 'common' language. This is not simply a distinction between the speech of different people, educated vs less educated, but between the circumstances in which we are using the language. Sometimes we use the 'educated' form and sometimes we used the common form, depending on whom are addressing and the subject matter in question. So for example, when I am speaking to professional colleagues about some technical issue in my field, then I will tend to use the 'educated' form of the language, which happens to be largely romance/latin-based. On the other hand, when watching a football match or having fun with friends or in the middle of an altercation in the street I am much more likely to use the Germanic vocabulary. In Chaucer's time, the distinction would have been much more determined by social position - the aristocratic and mercantile classes using the language of their Norman rulers, and the peasant classes continuing to use the language of their Germanic forefathers.

[Goofy GrandLouis]

true !

[Joaquín Moreno]

Sometimes children have the best answers. I will explain why I don't quite see English as a hybrid: My household is absolutely Latin, my wife being Italian and me being Spanish. And we live in Germany. So our two-year-old daughter knows that Spanish is a language, and Italian is another language, and she knows they're both quite similar, so she tends to mix the two. She's also familiar with German but she knows it's quite different and it's the language of the people outside our house, so she doesn't mix it with Spanish or Italian very often. Now English comes into play: An American guy comes to our place once a week to clean. So my daughter knows English is another language, but she sees it as a different kind of German. When the guy says something in English to her she answers in German! She doesn't understand much English, but to the prejudice-free ears of my baby, the few things she does understand seem to sound closer to German. She also answers in German, when I say something in English. Same thing happens every time we go to the Netherlands or Denmark: she speaks German in those situations. So, from the point of view of a Latin baby, you guys are clearly Germanic - but maybe she will change her mind the day she starts reading in these languages.

[Jose Luis Reyes]

Es muy interesante todo lo que mencionas, ojalá tu hija pueda hablar perfectamente los 4 idiomas desde muy joven, he conocido algunos casos de bebés en situaciones similares y los padres prefieren "no confundir" a sus hijos hablándoles sólo en un idioma cuando justo pueden aprender fácilmente los que sean.

[Imammasri_18]

That's so cute!!

[puma]

buena acotacion!

[Kaseb Mohamed]

as it was said before, I think that from a purely linguistic and scientific point of view there is no debate, English is a Germanic language, in its core vocabulary and structure it has very little in common with French and a lot with Dutch and German (strong verbs and basic words like colours, body parts or family are a clear indication, even phonology is by far more Germanic than Romance) but apart from that I'm very interested in the way people feel their own language, without any scientific considerations, just from personal feelings, and your comment is easily one of the most interesting I've ever read about that! that reminds me of another story that I had read on another site: two children, one English and one Dutch, who were on holidays in France, they were both exposed to French, couldn't understand anything of it and were seeing it clearly as a foreign language, but when they met together they thought that they spoke the same language, and each one thought that the other one was just speaking "strangely", finally they managed to understand each other to some extent! the children may find it easier to deal with the regular sound shifts that separate English and Dutch (great-groot, red-rood etc...), whereas the adults may be more hindered by the habit of hearing their language in only one way

[TheSharpmarksman]

English to german ears sounds very familiar it's strange how children can understand foreign langauges without learning them i've always wondered how this process works

[Pwoody]

I had never heard the creole hypothesis before. Interesting. I do like the linguistic definition/approach and consider it Germanic, but altered to be amazingly flexible and able to include words from essentially all languages.

[Byoo Byoo]

I think spanish is the less complicated of all latin languages. And English is by far the easiest of all germanic languages grammatically but phonetically it can be difficult. English is my second language, native language is brazilian portuguese. And studying other languages is a hobby. Beautiful channel. 👏👏

[jw31]

Phonologically all the west germanic languages are a pain in the ass, although i’d say that english is still one of the harder ones in terms of pronunciation because the “th” sound is a very rare sound (and it’s so annoying that even native speakers don’t bother pronouncing it half of the time) and it’s excessive usage of diphthongs. Romance languages like spanish have much simpler pronunciation.

[C64 OS Official Channel]

English is definitely a germanic language. I've struggled to learn French for many years. There are just a bunch of weird grammatical traits that are hard to wrap my head around. When I started studying Dutch, despite (as you pointed out) having to struggle a bit more to decode the meanings of some of the words, the grammar feels totally natural to me. My progress learning Dutch skyrocketed past my progress learning French, in much less time. Because I'd spent so much time on French, it never even occurred to me that foreign languages could be much more like English... until I tried learning Dutch.

[Christian Easter]

I've always had an interest in German because my father's family was originally from Germany. A number of years ago I came across some examples of middle German and old English. I could see very little difference between the two. It was very odd to me at that time how close they were.

[Glenn Gilbert]

An excellent presentation. In my experience as an L1 English speaker who has learned both Italin and German, I can say that despite the fact that German has 'more' grammar than English, syntax became more logical to me earlier in the learning process and I progressed much faster, whereas Italian has always been a struggle because it doesn't fall into place so easily

[Eduardo Machado]

I think English the most latin of the germanic languages and French is the most germanic of the latin languages ... haha

[Andrzej Dobrowolski]

And Polish is the most latinised Slavic language since we use alot of words of Latin origin that have no native Polish - Slavic equivalents

[Luis Rincón]

And Romanian is the most slavicized of the Roman Languages.

[TaintedTaylor]

Not really, there are languages that have more Germanic influence, for example: Romansch and Friulian. The “Germanic” part of French is actually close to almost any other Romance language, like Italian and Spanish.

[Sofia Sbd]

French has a lot of celtic influences also

[Chs Grate]

I mean yeah,I cant understand German,knowing English so,yeah

[Kelli *******]

I’m a native English speaker who studied Latin & is close to fluent in German. After seeing this video I believe English is a sort of creole language & that it is both Germanic & romance influenced. The root language is Germanic but English is heavily influenced by words coined from other languages like French, Spanish, etc.

[baronam]

I agree with you, it is a hybrid language which makes English easier to learn than German. As a native Spanish speaker, I always enjoy reading English texts with words that have Latin/French origin because they are easy to understand for me. There are many English words of Germanic origin that have helped me learn German ones. However, there are German words that only exist in that language for which I have no reference and have to learn "from scratch". Thank you for the video, very informative and educational.

[Vinnie]

Thanks to the Romance loanwords in the English language, which I speak fairly well, I can better understand my native language: Swedish. This might sound surprising but it's actually not. Swedish have a decent amount of "fancy" French and Latin loanwords that most people don't use in a "every day" context (kontext is actually one of these words) However these words tend to be more common in English, so a decent grasp of English will surely help you. I have a relatively good vocabulary in Swedish, but there are still times when I need to rely on English. A few days ago I stumbled upon the word "emanciperad" while going through the SweSAT (Högskoleprovet) and while I've heard it before I can easily say the only reason I know its meaning is my knowledge of English. Sometimes I also rely on English when I read medical texts, because I know the Latin names of various diseases through English, like sepsis (in every day Swedish we would usually say blodförgiftning = blood poisoning).

[Sam]

English is my native language. I learned Spanish in my teens, I’ve learned a bit of German being that it was my mom’s native language. With that said, depending on how you want to speak, and what second language would be more relevant to you, you could speak primarily Germanic rooted words or primarily French rooted words and have an easier time shifting into one or the other via that route.

[Jeremiasz Czereśniowiecki]

I'm Polish and I also noticed that many words in Spanish are similar to English ones. And English is harder to learn for me because it's less intuitive and has a hard pronunciation (but I've started it early so it wasn't obvious to realise). Maybe grammar is harder because of conjugation and subjunctive mode, but most of the constructions are similar to ours or English ones so it's not especially problematic.

[OneManMob]

Being myself of Slavic origin, having learnt English, German and French I can definitely confirm that English is a Germanic language - the whole foundation, like grammar has much more in common with German than French. If English language was a building - its foundations would be Germanic, main structure mostly Germanic and the rendering - mostly Romance.

[Joseph Brabander]

Excellent analysis. Slavic languages are quite different from western languages. Most are heavily inflected and articles are non-existent.

[DustyO'Rusty]

@Joseph Brabander Slavic languages have more in common grammatically with languages like Latin due to their heavy case inflections. English, while it doesn’t have noun cases like German, it is obviously Germanic. It’s simplified structure has more in common with Swedish or Danish, which are north Germanic languages due to them also being heavily simplified from 1000 years ago. Still, it is clear that English is closer to German and Dutch, even with the millennium of romance and Norse influence.

[Mary Petrie]

Brilliant explanation.

[Erik Eriksson]

@DustyO'Rusty Could be so that the structure of english was influenced by old norse.

[JBguitar 1990]

Exactly. English borrows a shit ton of French words but when it comes to grammar rules, it’s completely different.

[William Jones]

I took French and German in high school. I found French easier, but I noticed that learning German was frustrating for similar reasons that learning proper English as a child in school was frustrating. Namely, the remnants of old cases in the form of irregulars (which we all hate) seemed to be more the rule than the exception in German 😅

[Muuh]

I had only a glimpse of what old German looked like and I find it even more comparable to English than modern German. It is even clearer then, to see how the roots are similar but due to multiple reforms to pronunciation and writing have taken different routes and diverged from each other over time.

[David Freeman]

I think that it's worth mentioning that, even with a sentence that's mostly in Germanic vocabulary and following Germanic grammatical patterns, it's common for that sentence in English, to, literally, 'sound' or 'seem' nothing like her Germanic relatives. If anything, those sentences would 'seem' and 'sound' much more like her Latin counterparts, especially French, and in some cases Spanish or even Italian too. That's because, under multiple influences, including at least Latin influence twice, English has an orthography and phonology that's vastly different from virtually all other Germanic languages, and if anything is a lot closer to that of Latin. What that means is, even under a Germanic grammatical system and using Germanic vocabulary, English would still use the letters to represent sounds in a way that's more 'Latin'. A good example to show is: Oh yeah. Queen Angela, enjoy your gin now. Soon the knights will come with their knives... Sound scary yeah? But my point is, in a lot of those words (mostly Germanic origin if I'm not mistaken) we can see how English is written and spoken in a 'Romance' way: * First take a glance at this sentence. You don't see any more character other than the 26 A-Z alphabet, which is, as a reminder, standard LATIN alphabets developed by Romans, primary to write the LATIN language. So it should be no surprising that, these letters are usually enough for Latin languages such as Spanish & Italian (Italian actually uses only 21 letters plus 2 accent markings, while in practice k & w can be considered not used in Spanish, so Spanish has either 24 letters and 2 accent marks, or 25 letters and 1 accent mark if you consider n tilda as a letter), but for other languages, including most Germanic languages, as well as Slavic/Baltic languages, Hungarian, Albanian, etc. additional characters needs to be introduced. In this case, you might 'feel' that English is more like Latin in that most written English is mostly based only on 26 characters. While when you read any other Germanic languages, all those 'special letters' would probably be something that catches your eyes. (Although in this case I don't know how 'Romance' it makes English, since most notably, French, and also Portuguese, uses a lot of such accent markings or even special characters). That already indicates the problem you have with English. Either certain sounds in Germanic languages are lost outright, or maybe new combinations of letters needs to be developed to represent the same sounds. (Which partially caused the 'messy' spelling of English which is also discussed here). * Let's look at, first, 'oh' and 'yeah'. First notice that both contains an 'h' at the end, but it doesn't pronounce, and really isn't part of a diagraph like 'ch'. I don't think oh, ah, or eah can be considered 'diagraphs'. In some case you can argue especially for 'oh' the h sort of indicated a change of sound. But under both cases, it makes English a little more 'like' Latin and 'unlike' Germanic. As in all modern Romance languages, h is almost always silent, which is kept in certain English words like honor, honest, hour, as well as, in certain dialects, herb, heir, etc. However that feature, although not non-existent, is not universal, or even common in Germanic languages. Just look at the name. The letter h is read 'ache' (or I think it should be spelled hache, with the leading h silent like that in French & Spanish). In most Germanic languages the /h/ sound would be present in the name of the letter H. * Yeah/yes is a Germanic word I believe. They have very similar cognates in other Germanic languages, which is almost always, 'Ja'. And hopefully most people realize that in other Germanic languages 'Ja' would read like 'Yah' or 'yaw', which is a lot closer to yeah/yes. But that's exactly the point. In almost all Indo-European languages that uses Latin script, only languages on the British Isles and Romance languages doesn't use the j to represent the 'y' sound (in 'yes'). All other European languages, including all Germanic languages, all Slavic languages that uses Latin script, Albanian, and even Hungarian & Finnish which aren't even Indo-European, uses j as a y. So much so that under IPA /j/ represents the y sound in English, not the j sound. Speaking of the j sound, the English pronunciation is sort of unique, as the closest are French, Portuguese and Romanian has a j (and soft g sound which I'll go over later) that's like the j in English but without a stop in front. (Like s in Asia, dj in those languages would represent the same j sound in English). However a theory is that at least soft g, if not j also, represented the English j sound, the one with a stopping /d/ in the front at first, but then it got simplified to the current sound in French & Portuguese, just like how ch is now 'sh' and qu is now 'q' or 'k' in those languages. Also I'd put Italian on the same team, since their soft g is the exact same as English. Only that they've developed a way to 'soften' g where it would originally be 'hard' (put a silent i after and put an accent mark on the letter after i to indicate silence of i) so there's no need for the letter j. So that would cause English to have more similarities with Romance languages in this sense. * The word queen is also Germanic. However, the 'kw' sound is represented by qu, which is sort of another Latin influence. It's rare for any other Germanic language to use qu to represent kw or k in such a 'native', Germanic rooted word like 'queen'. * Angela and gin. I don't know the origin or the name of Angela, but I just know that this name is common in both English and quite a few other Germanic languages. For example, the current German leader's name is Angela Merkel. However, notice that her name should be pronounced 'Anghela', while the name, spelled exactly in English, would sound like 'Anjela'. Also, gin is one of the only examples I could think of and confirm Germanic origin, yet with a soft 'g' sound. The point here is, 'hard & soft g' is a universal feature in Latin languages, but not so much in Germanic languages. Most Germanic languages don't have it, except for Swedish, which is a similar rule: soft g = j, but only that in Swedish, yet again, j is not English or French j (which sometimes English words would pronounce like, like regime for example, also dodge, since dge in French would be exactly, j in English). * Knights and knives. Here we go, the classic 'silent k'. Those words also have cognates in Germanic, where the k is NOT silent, and a sort of 'hard' consonant 'kn' and 'gn exists in almost all other Germanic languages. However, English dropped most of them. Which would sound a little like Romance languages, where such hard sounds are rare. * Also, here, if we're talking about one knight, instead of plural, knights, you can see that the only change is the ending s. While of course English infamously has so many irregularities and exceptions on this, the 'default' way of making plural is by adding s or es. That's not the case for almost all other Germanic languages. (Except for Dutch where it is sometimes the case, but not always). However, this IS the default way of plurality in neighboring Romance languages like French, Spanish and Portuguese. * Finally, look at the word 'come', which I believe is also Germanic. Its cognate in Dutch is literally 'kommen' if I remembered correctly. And here, we can get a glimpse of how much English prefer c over k when possible (with only a few exceptions, mainly when regarding at the end of a word, ck and k is sometimes preferred). This is not seen in any other Germanic language. Also like her Latin counterparts but unlike most of her Germanic ones, English has a distinction between 'soft & hard c'. And the rule is exactly the same as if in French, Portuguese, and Spanish (with exception of some European dialects where 'soft c' is more like th in thing or theory). As I show in the word 'come' or 'welcome', these rules extended into Germanic origin words also. Other than English, the only other Germanic languages to use c such extensively is Dutch, but only with Latin origin words. K is usually preferred in Germanic origin words. Other Germanic languages such as certain Scandinavian languages would go as far as changing c to k, s, z and making c a rarely used alphabet. (Except in certain diagraphs like ch, ck, etc.). Even Germans sort of does that by changing republic into 'republik' for example. Although from what I know this is NOT French influence. It is, though, at the end of the day, Latin influence. It probably stems from the fact that most of today's Britain (especially England) was under Roman rule. Britain is a Romance language word and London has a history dating back to that period. That's not the case for most other Germanic speaking countries like today's Germany or Scandinavia. However unlike France or Iberia, Latin language didn't take foot under Roman rule in Britain. But the writing system did influence the pre-Anglo-Saxon languages in that area. For example as shown in this video, king started with 'cy' but still pronounced 'k' instead of 's' that happens today. That's how Roman writing system at that time influenced Celtic & other languages, which Anglo Saxons adopted when they write OE. And frankly, some say it's actually Norman French that introduced soft c, and hence using of k in front of i, e, y to ME. * Another thing noticeable in the word 'come' is the silent final e. This is a feature most likely that English borrowed from French, and isn't shared with most other Romance OR Germanic languages. I think there's a video showing how common silent letters are in English. Literally every letter can be silent in some word or proper name, although h, e, k, etc. seem to be the most commonly muted ones. So all of these would probably giving a little more favor to the 'creolization' theory I guess...

[Nathan Sutton]

I was US exchange student in a French speaking country (French Swiss) -- I then studied German seven years later. I had always been afraid of German (probably for some WWII bias -- and the long words scared my brain, lol) but as I learned German, the structure was surprisingly a direct fit with English. I came to feel/find the simpler the speaking/sentence/phrase was, the closer it was to German and the more complex (and often scientific) the closer it was to French. It surprised (quelle surprise) my French friends when my speaking ability was slow and rudimentary but I could say existentialism (existantialisme)... once you learn the format, the Franco-fying was almost always direct. I was always terrible with gender cases though. Une fois, un fois? ... d'accord. Je m'en fous... Tu comprends

[Briney Foster]

my grandparents were German immigrants to the U.S., as a child I thought their German was just a kind of English spoken at home, more gemütlich than the formal English spoken in the outside world

[Gibran Aditama]

Ja stimmt

[SecretAgent02]

Interesting. I'm not surprised.

[faisal3398]

@江泽民 President Jiang commie

[Putin is a Terrorist]

As a german english doesn't really Sound germanic to me at all..... Dutch, danish, Swedish, icelandic etc. are germanic sounding languages but not english

[Bryan Sulbaran]

as a Native Spanish speaker who know’s Portuguese and in the process of learning French and German. English does have some Latin in it but the connection it has with German and Dutch is way higher then with Spanish or French they also have very similar cultures compared to Southern European is similar to Korean who’s languages is influence by Chinese and Japanese.

[maxime cote]

I like the idea of Hybrid! Germain, French, Norman(which was influenced by French). The Norman use to prononce the sound « GU » like « Wh » Ex: in French « Guerre »was « werre » in Norman which become « War » in English. Same as Guillaume(William) , Guarantie( warenty)etc. Anyway, old French world commonly use un English are migrating back in The French language…and we call them Anglisim!😀 Very interesting videos! Thank you!😀

[Hacked Robot]

I would guess that along with the importation of words from other languages, also comes the importation of some additional speech sounds, which can be a good thing since it enables the coinage of many new words based on a wider variety of options.

[Vincent Ngan]

In addition to vocabulary and grammar, there are other characteristics of English that make it classified as a Germanic language. For example, English as with other Germanic languages is stress-timed but French and other Romance languages are syllable-timed.

[Roodge]

I heard that European Portuguese is stress-timed just like English

[NotChomsky]

Great presentation. You are getting better at this. You made so many great points, that I thirst for more in depth comparisons between the inventory of allowed sounds in each language and all that borrowing of words. For example, do the sounds follow the words into a new language or does the language that accepts these new words filter them by acceptance sound rules? If so, then how does each rule work? In other words, is English spoken with a germanic sound system or Latin or what? Or maybe English is spoken with some sort of mix.

[Michael Toney]

It’s very interesting that English seems to retain the memory of the higher class French rulers and the lower class Anglo Saxon servants from after the conquest in 1066. In common speak we use Germanic words more often but in formal we tend to use French or Latin.

[Lissandra Freljord]

You can use a tree analogy for that too. The roots and trunk are the Germanic parts of English, and the leaves and flowers form the Latin parts. The roots and trunk are the most vital part of the tree, as they form the foundation and backbone of the tree. Without the roots and trunk, the tree cannot receive the vital nutrients from the soil to grow, and, thus, it will never flourish. Similarly, English cannot be spoken at all without a single Germanic word. The most common everyday words that form the base of the language are Germanic. On the other hand, the most colorful and academic words in English are of Latin and French origin, just like the most colorful parts of a tree are the leaves and flowers. They are not absolutely vital for the tree to survive (well other than the reproduction cycle for its offsprings), but they get to enjoy the light of day from the highest point of view, and get all the attention from people for their sheer their beauty. Similarly, the most poetic and fancy words of English tend to be of Latin origin. If you attempt speaking English purely with Latin-based words, then you will realize how pretentious you sound. The true identity of English is Germanic, but he just happens to like wearing luxurious Latin-made suits to pass as a gentleman, unlike his other Germanic siblings. And regarding the French Normans and Anglo-Saxons in Britain, we can also make an analogy with the tree model. The rich and educated Norman-French upper-class enjoyed the view of the leaves, flowers, and sun from up above, while the Anglo-Saxon peasants lived underneath the dirt, doing the vital work to support the upper-class.

[olivier legendre]

@Lissandra Freljord So were do you place words like "very", "(be)cause", "try", "push", "easy", "please", "just", etc. ? Near the sun or near the dirt ? English is what made it. I propose we take your comment and leave out only the Germanic words and ask an English person to tell us what the text is about. Then we take out only the French/latin words and ask another English person what the text is about. That would be interesting as a test ! Also do you need a language to say "I am hungry" or to create the modern society you live in ?

[To Ade]

@olivier legendre Those words have Germanic equivalents like "wholly" and "highly" for very and "as" for because.

[olivier legendre]

@To Ade So from now on please stop using very and because.

[Alea Jacta Est]

English: After a terrible accident, an ambulance arrived within six minutes to evacuate the victims to the hospital. French: Après un terrible accident, une ambulance est arrivée en six minutes pour évacuer les victimes à l'hôpital. German: Nach einem schrecklichen Unfall traf innerhalb von sechs Minuten ein Krankenwagen ein, um die Opfer ins Krankenhaus zu evakuieren. English = 41% French + 33% Germanic + 15% Latin + 5% old Norse + 1% Dutch + 5% Other :)

[My Nostalgia]

I think the same thing happened with Proto-Slavic language. Having Baltic foundation (the closest to Proto-Slavic langauge are Western Baltic languages) it derived lots of words from Iranic, Germanic and Celtic languages which caused it to become another language group.

[sam hu]

I think it absolutely is germanic. I was surprised by how similar English was to German when I started to learn. We might not have cases and adjective endings or genders, but the logic feels very similar, especially if you know other romance languages.

[MrLantean]

The reason for English to be classified as Germanic is due to its grammatical structure. However English speakers are able to recognize many Italian, Spanish and French words due influenced by the Romance Norman French. Norman French is a form of French spoken by the Normans who are the descendants of Viking settlers who are granted Normandy by the Franks in return for defending France from other Vikings. These Vikings are assimilated into local population embracing its local language and converting to Christianity. After the Normans conquered England in 1066, Norman French become the court language as most Anglo-Saxon nobility are replaced by Norman ones. The general population continue to use Anglo-Saxon language. Overtime, the Norman French spoken in England become distinct from the one back in Normandy and become known as Anglo-Norman. The blending of Germanic Anglo-Saxon with Romance Anglo-Norman French create the English language.

[Poseidon Oceanstorm]

Without latin roots, English wouldnt be so easy to understand from Romance languages. English is a bond between Romance and Germanic. Almost every texts I read in English with adjectives were with Latin or French words to be more precise As a French from Québec, I can assure you that without French vocabulary in it, it would be much more complicated to understand and to learn

[Lorenzo Fabrício Irajá Pereira]

As a portuguese, english and spanish speaker (C2, C1 and B2, respectfully), who's currently learning german, the way sentences are created in german seem very, very similar to english for me, even though the lack of gender and inflexion in english makes it way easier. On the other hand, I had and have a much easier time with the english vocab than with the german one, because even if the words dont always have the same roots as in portuguese, i can recognize suffixes and prefixes, and find similarity with more academic language in portuguese that hints the meaning pretty reliably. The same thing happens way less frequently in german, comparing to when i was just starting in english (how comfortable I am reading german texts 5 months into learning is about how I was in like 3 months into english, even though I am much more experienced in learning a language now). Great video as always

[Rescue162]

Excellent analysis. In my view after looking at this, common daily speech between friends and family tends to derive from Old English ("I had lunch with some friends"; "I read some books"), while more formal or worldly speech tends to have more Romance words ("The President convened with his cabinet to discuss domestic and foreign policy").

[fromchomleystreet]

Even as a mono-lingual native English speaker, it is completely clear to me that English is much more closely related to German and Dutch than it is to any of the Romance languages. I don’t speak German, but I can understand bits of what a German speaker says simply because the English equivalent is so similar, both in vocabulary and structure. If I listen to a French speaker, I will recognise particular words that clearly share a Latin root (either via French or independently), but because the syntax is so completely different, as are all of the most basic, everyday words that do the bulk of the work in any language, I can make little sense of what is being said. German and Dutch just sound, to my mono-lingual ears, like different versions of the same language I speak. The Romance languages don’t.

[LowbatmanGaming]

it’s not about listening in this case it’s about reading mainly, you’re not going to read the entire english lexicon in one conversation of course what english, german, and french as well as other romance languages are going to sound different because they evolved differently. There’s way more latin vocabulary in english by far though despite the grammatical structure being obviously germanic

[fromchomleystreet]

@LowbatmanGaming There’re numerically more words of Latin origin than Germanic in the entirety of the English vocabulary, that’s true. But the crucial point is what KINDS of words they are. Latin and Greek dominate science and technology words, words related to prestigious pursuits. But the most commonly used words - words like “and” and “the” and the words for common, everyday things, words that will be used in every conversation, are overwhelmingly Germanic. So while there are more words in English that have non-Germanic origins, any English speaker will spend more of their lifetime speaking a Germanic word than they will spend speaking a Latin word.

[LowbatmanGaming]

@fromchomleystreet Bring up an original argument, im not arguing that english is a latin language, just has more latin influence by far and the only reason people say more germanic words is because of grammar and language and the fact that the most common words of a language are usually grammatical words such as prepositions. But i don’t disagree with what you’re saying

[LowbatmanGaming]

latin and greek don’t dominate science and technology they dominate virtually everything that isn’t grammatical, which is why i said it’s more about reading, and with context you’ll see that most complex multisyllable words are latin and greek, as well as prefixes and suffixes. Yes most people are going to mainly speak germanic words because they’re common, but to even express anything with meaning it requires you to use a word with latin/greek (french) origin and that’s a fact. English is a Germanic language for that reason and that reason only. if the grammatical structure weren’t germanic it would be a romance language for sure, despite there still being around 20-30% of the words with germanic origin. it’s how humans classify languages

[LowbatmanGaming]

@fromchomleystreet so basically we are saying the same thing lol, except i disagree with your first original comment. i don’t think it would be easier for an english speaker to understand german vs a romance language like spanish italian portuguese even french despite the accent the very point you brought up about the latin roots of words is the reason why that is yes the grammatical structure is similar in german but to understand someone the words in sentences don’t have to be in order so as long as they’re there so IMO an english speaker should understand another romance language better than a germanic language especially with the accent as well. Other than that i agree with you

[Rivkah Song]

It's always so interesting to me to study history and see how events that happened centuries ago still influence us today even without knowing we're being affected. In the 11th century a man named William left his home in Normandy, conquered all of England, and declared himself king. He brought with him his French language and his loyal compatriots whom he made the landed aristocracy. This started a 300 year tradition of speaking French in the royal court. But even now, centuries on and in lands far away from England and France, anytime an English speaker wants to sound formal, business-like, educated, or rich they default to French (and latin) based words. Simply incredible.

[Connor Brignall]

I think dialect should come into it as well, for example I'm from north yourkshire and we use a lot of scandinavian words in our everyday vocabulary, such as Seldom (sjeldon) bærn (barn) gannin (gangen) gir (gir, literally means give) and there are loads more too. Something I thought I'd share with u guys.

[Basic Beach Community]

Love York, been there

[matt armstrong]

I've been working on something like a Swadesh list in my free time the last several weeks. What I have found is that for the 120 or so words on my list so far, about 113 or so of them descend from Old English. Three or four are from Old French or Anglo-Norman, a couple are from Old Norse, one is from Greek.

[kluski z pluskwami]

Learning both English and German I can say that knowledge of English really helped me to understand German better. German grammar is really similar to English grammar, which is really helpful, especially when it comes to distinguishing tenses. But I find German much harder than English.

[Nunya Biz]

As a native English speaker, German grammar bothers me. Instead of “Do you speak German?”, you say “Speak you German?” Instead of “I always play piano”, you said “I play always piano.” And don’t get me started on gendered articles and nouns, as well as different verb endings!

[kluski z pluskwami]

@Nunya Biz Yes, that's why I find German much harder and cannot really speak it fluently. Although, as a native Polish speaker, it's easier for me to understand grammatical cases and conjugation rules, as I have them in my own native language. But articles and strict rules of sentence order, which often seem quite unnatural, are killing me.

[Antoine Mozart]

Are you kidding ? German grammar is completely different from English.

[adolfo rodolfo]

@Antoine Mozart It's not "completely" different, it's just different in specific ways. German grammar/syntax is actually closer to English than French is. And as for the inversion of subject/verb in questions, there's nothing specifically German about that; French does it too: "Parlez-vous français?". We used to do it in English as well if you go back far enough; we just don't do it anymore.

[Miguel DeLeon]

I stumbled on this just now, and find it very well done. As to my opinion, I had just finished listening to another video with Old English pronunciation, and it SOUNDS extremely Germanic. So no matter what English may be on paper, in speech it sounds as though it comes from Germanic sources.

[Cat Lessor]

Honestly as someone learning german, sometimes I'll hear a sentence, and know what it means just because it sounds like the sentence in English.

[Herr Friberger]

A germanic language like swedish is even closer to english, especially regarding word order, although usually not spoken as slowly and clearly (to english ears) as high german tend to be. The viking influence being a partial explanation here, the common low german connection another. Saxons, angles, jutes, and scandinavians shared almost the same proto-germanic language (from the late nordic bronze age, iron age and onwards). (English and swedish also share many french loans, making them even closer, but that's another story.)

[Ricky911]

Same

[viking 14]

Rodrigo O real Englishmen have Germanic appearance not really look like Mr bean

[Helen Silver]

I, too, am learning German. Often I understand a word because of the English connection to the German word ("world" = "welt").

[THEMISCHEIFGAMER ATMICKS]

Agree

[Luis Manuel Díaz Barón]

I was amazed by the number of familiar words (to Spanish) in English when I started learning German, I'm native Spanish speaker and can also speak English, in German you won't find as many similar words as you do in English.

[Nunya Biz]

That is such an ignorant statement. (The above sentence contains 5 Germanic words and 1 Romance word.)

[EonSprite]

imagine how much closer and easier it would be to learn Swedish/Norwegian/German if we were closer related to germanic languages

[$5note]

For me English is absolutely a Germanic Language, having studied Italian, Japanese, and now German, the grammar that German boasts is much more similar to English than Italian is. You can tell that German and English come from the same place. The thing I tell other people is imagine instead of having a couple loanwords from a language like Japanese such as sushi and samurai and anime, imagine half of English is just Japanese loanwords that have since been corrupted to fit our Anglic language... That's basically our relationship with French and the sheer magnitude of loanwords we get from that language. The only other language I can think of that has a penchant for pinching other people's words is Japanese itself, which I've studied for 8 years now, as not only does it borrow and corrupt alot of Chinese words and pronunciation (especially with the complex Kanji System) but also it borrows and corrupts alot of English loanwords to fit its Japonic Grammatical style ever since the American occupation of Japan after WW2. I would say that Japanese to Chinese is like English to French and Japanese to English is like English to Greek. In other words, the fundamental structure is still Germanic, despite the sheer amount of Loanwords from French and Latin and Greek that we have since corrupted and bent to fit Anglic Grammar.

[jw31]

The japanese-english as english-greek analogy actually makes sense, although it’s by no means a perfect analogy. Japanese adopting english loanwords is similar to other modern languages doing the same. It’s a uniquely modern phenomenon because of how much more interconnected the world is. The words that english adopted from greek are mostly words related to academic concepts like “democracy” and “philosophy.” In that sense, Chinese is to japanese as greek is to english since japan coined a lot of academic terms using chinese characters, similar to how english uses greek roots. In japanese, democracy is 民主 (literally “people rule”) and philosophy is 哲学 (literally “wisdom study”), both words constructed in japan but using characters (roots) from chinese. Funnily enough, when china underwent modernization, it adopted these japanese made words into chinese.

[William Nethercott]

I am English, have a little German and French. I used to work a lot with French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch people. In general, it seemed to me that French people found English more difficult than the others and I have a feeling that it is because of the way English is taught. Many French people told me they were taught that over 60% of English words were the same as French, which isn't really true and led to a lot of mistakes/misunderstandings. However, I grew up immersed in the Geordie dialect and, to me, it feels like English is much closer to German/Danish/Dutch than it is to French, plus there are differences between the northern and southern parts of England. Further confusion also arises from words that are very similar in romance and germanic languages (Famille, Familie etc).

[howard c]

Whenever I hear Dutch or Danish being spoken it sounds so much like English, like I should be able to understand it but I can't, then certain bits jump out that are identical to English. I was watching the show 1899 and when the Danish was being spoken I could understand quite a few sentences without the subtitles, but if I had no knowledge of Spanish I wouldn't have understood the spanish parts at all. Spoken Dutch and Danish remind me mostly of northen dialects in Britain

[TheYopogo]

A Dutch person once told me that English sounds like "a drunk Frisian trying to speak French"

[Language Lover]

🤣🤣🤣🤣

[angel miau]

In germany Dutch sounds like a german being drunk.

[Mr Bond]

Dutch is civilized German. 😁

[Wickwynn]

That's not too far off from what actually happened historically

[Steve 14]

@angel miau as a English speaker I heard from the French that English sounds like vary broken french

[Ruffy]

I've seen a video about old english recently and I, as a native german speaker, was able to understand or better guess some words better than some native english speakers cause the words sounded quite familiar to nowadays dutch and german

[EVPaddy]

For me, as a Swiss-German native (and btw, I'd say Swiss German is closer to old English than German) it was definitely a lot more natural to learn English than to learn the roman languages.

[Henry S]

I'm learning German right now and comparing German's etymology with English. German and English far away sound almost exactly the same, just the sounds are ordered differently. If you simplify German's grammar or refer back to Old English grammar, they look very much like each other with numerous cognates. If you listen to reconstructed Proto-Germanic you'll hear a lot of English consonants not found in most other Germanic languages. You can translate most German sentences word for word in English if you use Middle or Old English sources. Wie geht's? Can be "Wes goes?" "Was machst du hier?" becomes "what makest thou here?" There are similarities with the other Germanic languages too, but that would make a long post. Point is: English is firmly Germanic. Always has been, the Latin vocabulary is mainly academic/technical jargon and much of the rest inessential to the language, it's there to sound fancy or give depth to the language's meaning.

[Empress]

I think English is a Germanic language. :) Btw I love how this was presented where you had a word for word analysis. I was just blown away when I saw that. And then the casual versus more formal speech reflecting more Germanic or more Romance words....that was awesome! Thank you for this!!! As someone who loves languages I appreciated this video so much!

[Steve 14]

I think it depends on pronunciations and accents for example the United States says pants or elevator which are of Latin origins while the UK says lift or trousers in fact the entire country of the USA was based of the Roman Empire and Roman Republic including the USA more simplified Grammer and vocabulary compared to the UK is find that the USA has way more Spanish influence then any other English speaking country's and Canadian pronunciations was more influenced by the Scottish and Irish which is Celtics so I think it honestly depends

[Nunya Biz]

@Steve 14 That’s bullshit. American English is much more Germanic than British English. American: hallway British: corridor American: color, catalog, theater, center British: colour, catalogue, theatre, centre Not only is British vocabulary more Latinized, but British spelling is more Frenchified.

[Tim Heinz]

As an English, I find learning Spanish and French to be easier than German because of the abundance of loan words and cognates, but you do have to watch out for false cognates. They are like load words that were redefined to means something else, but they looked the same in both languages.

[TJ O'Donnell]

When I (native American English speaker) lived in Germany, I was often mistaken for being Dutch, due to my accent. I took that as a compliment. I always found Dutch easier to understand if I listened/read with one ear/eye in English and the other ear/eye in German.

[Antony Charnock]

I always think Dutch English speakers sound American. I think its because they draw words out like Americans. I once got asked in Spain by an English speaking waiter where I was from as he didnt recognise my accent. I told him it was Northern English which is very Scandinavian influenced(Vikings & all that) He had learned English in Florida!

[Sara Rose]

There's also the change that the "Proper Names" big is actually a two-way street, like how many last names come from professions, like the family name of Smith usually referred to a family of crafters like blacksmiths. English is "technically" a West-Germanic language, but in a similar way that a child will usually have the same blood type as one parent or the other. I think that makes English the "red headed stepshild" of the West-Germanic languages, or the interlang love child of its germanic and romance parents lol.

[Damian Heslop]

I'm a Geordie, and are slang words are old English, witch is Germanic with some Norse words mixed in. I find it so funny, as most people forget about English accents in the different regions. Anglo Saxon's are the English people, and even to this day there is still so many places and town names in Anglo Saxon. English has come from the Germanic language with other influenced words, witch changed in time, but so has the Danish, Dutch, German, etc, language changed. Not all English people speak the queen's English lol.

[dandylion18]

I speak English & French. When I was learning to read German, I found that my knowledge of English was MUCH more helpful than my French. Of course, when I taught 'Beowulf' with the Old English on the facing page, it was my English that allowed me hear the echoes of the distant past.

[God]

0:35 The German has a more English feeling to it. Like just the way it's written and how the words are. It feels more familiar. But I can definitely understand the French more, but I think that's only because I've studied a little of it, as well as Latin in high school.

[adolfo rodolfo]

I've just come back from a holiday in Germany. I bought a copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales in German, which I can just about read. Most of these are in High German, albeit a slightly archaic version, but one is in Low German (Von dem Fischer un syner Fru). It was an epiphany. A modern Dutchman could read it with no trouble at all, but the really surprising thing was that it was easier to read for me, an Englishman, than modern German is - and I studied German for three years at school and had never encountered Low German before. If you have any doubts about where English belongs in the family tree of languages, this will take them away.

[Joris Weima]

I'm Dutch and I clearly remember that when I was a young kid and couldn't understand ANY english yet, the english language sounded very 'natural' to me, very familiair. Especially British english.

[DLC1325]

As a native English speaker whenever I hear Dutch being spoken it sounds like I should be able to understand what is being said but I can't!

[ThePlataf]

English has roots in Friesian, and Dutch people usually speak perfect English, which I really respect. I remember he postwar years when shiploads of Dutch migrated to Australia without knowing a word of English, and about a month later, they were chatting away to us in English.

[Ra Ra Rasputin]

To me Dutch has always sounded similar to some of the more niche dialects of English in Northern England.

[ThePlataf]

@Ra Ra Rasputin I don't speak any Dutch- the harsh guttural sounds are a turn-off, yet if I look through a Dutch magazine, I can usually get the gist of what an article is about.

[katina.svenska]

Shrug.

[Auroara Winberg]

German was quite easy for me to learn when I was in high school because they are so similar. I think that French or Spanish would have been so much harder for me to learn.

[John Doe]

As italian english it's very easy language. Most of the words are very similar to the italian (just change the pronunciation) and if you learn english and understand the basic mechanism of the structure you can even guess words you have never heard of and guess it easily. Most of the time i've guessed words that i've never heard of and my english colleagues told me it was the proper word...

[Nunya Biz]

English is a Germanic language. Its sentence structure, syntax, and grammar are all Germanic. Although English’s vocabulary is 58 percent Romance, this is an irrelevant figure as Romance words are used the most in academia. Of the 100 most common English words, 98 are Germanic in origin.

[Edwin Hesketh]

I’m English myself and at school learning french German and Spanish I always found German the easiest to pick up and by far the most relatable to English than the other two. You could tell there were a lot of similarities between the two. Also when I read in Dutch I can more or less make out what’s being said a lot of the time, not always but quite often I can. But any of the Latin languages, no chance so yeah I think it is true that English is most similar to languages like Dutch German and Frisian anyway but in my experience as well that is most definitely the case. There is no doubt though a big Latin influence in English as well not denying that but yeah it is clearly a German language for the most part

[Gaar Ondil]

For a French who learns English, the difficulty is to avoid to use romance words, because even if those words exist in English, they are generally less common, and using them seems a bit strange in a normal conversation.

[Nunya Biz]

Such as?

[Valeria Fonseca Diaz]

Very nice video. I'm reading a book called The story of French and it has a statement saying that English is the most Latin among Germanic languages and French is the most Germanic among Latin languages. I guess it's quite accurate

[dunnobe]

Native Dutch/Flemish speakers learn English so easily when they are young. The distance between the languages isn't far. I used to watch American/English shows, read the subtitles and immediately pick up the basics; bread - brood, water- water, cat - kat, milk - melk, green - groen...

[N Allanson]

Nederlands also has also borrowed a lot of Latin and French words. So there is both shared germanic vocabulary and shared Romance vocabulary. German has fewer shared Romance words with English.

[FG Connolly]

engels is gwn een Germaans taal *punt*

[fr3ddyfr3sh]

It’s not that different in German: Brot, Wasser, Katze, Milch, grün. house - Haus, fish - Fisch, wind- Wind, arm - Arm, finger- Finger

[Daninio]

@N Allanson Still most Flemish people in Belgium learn English easier than French alltough French is the 2nd language in Belgium and the 2nd language you learn in school... (in Flemish schools French starts around 10y old and English around 12-14y old)

[Wild Mountain Gwendy]

Flemish is considered the English Language’s ‘closest living linguistic relative’. That’s a thing...

[Sanad]

Interesting. I agree with what you've said @1:16, syntax and grammar is the key. Besides, it seems that the letter "n" at the end of many nouns, is used a lot in both languages (Eng. & Ger.). Syllabuses/ pronunciation of many words, seem to be common in both languages.

[Peter Hatton]

I read somewhere that in ordinary speech and writing most native English speakers' vocabulary is about 60 % from the Germanic substrate. However, poets from Shakespeare to Benjamin Zephaniah tend to use far more Germanic words -- usually around 80 %! I am a preacher and I used this insight to go through my sermons and, wherever possible, replace a Romance or Greek origin word with one with Old English roots. I believe this made my words not only clearer but more full of feeling.

[adolfo rodolfo]

Indeed. Shakespeare was very fond of "fancy language", words derived from French and Latin, he even used to invent quite a few; but when he wanted to appeal to the heart, to engage the audience's raw emotions, then he switched to Germanic monosyllables. A really good example of this is a speech in Richard II. Here Richard, despairing, tries to explain to his followers that underneath all the pomp and glory that goes with being king, he is just another insecure, frightened man. It's a wonderful speech and it ends with this switch from the Romance language of outward show to the Germanic of inner feeling and basic humanity: "Throw away respect, Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty, For you have mistook me all this while: I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king?

[Belky Hernandez]

I say that depends on the audience. As an English dominant bilingual speaker, I think Spanish is more expressive.

[Filipe Pereira]

i think you, Paul, are a great teacher! Congrats and thanks! Love your channel, super interesting and keep it up! Yes, english, in my opinion, is a hybrid language like almost all of them are all over the world today and are becoming more and more with the globalization influence as time goes by, no chance!xD PS: Latin and germanic languages rule the world mixed up in all european ones that made to the other continents, but prepare for the chinese for the next centuries! I believe they gona change the history xD

[Giuliano Merelli]

From the perspective of Spanish, English sounds like a language with a mostly Germanic structure and a mostly Latin vocabulary, even in several words that come from Proto-Germanic, since these in turn are closely related to Latin as well as French and Spanish are. Then, words like "I" are perceived also related to their romances equivalents "yo" or "io" and from this relationship with "Eu", "Ego" etc. The same with "Had" / "Habban", we relate it to the Latin "habemus", in Spanish "ha", "he", "han", from this related to "a". And so I could go on all day with other words. In short, Romance-speakers can establish kinship relationships between many of their words and those of Germanic origin in an almost instinctive way and they do better when they speak more than one Romance language. Therefore, from the Latin point of view, English sounds like a mixed language in the proportions that the graph says, approximately between 60 and 70 percent, said wrong and fast.

[1995music4ever]

I speak English, Italian, French and German and I believe that English is more similar to German than the other two languages. However, when it comes to formal speaking/writing the words are much more similar to Romance languages than German but when talking about phrasal verbs it's completely different.🥲😅 As you said, it's mostly a mixture of everything.

[Sergius Aleksandros]

I am Brazilian, which means I speak Portuguese natively. I also speak English fluently. I have watched both French and German movies and tv series. I couldn’t understand anything of the French ones, even though I speak a romance language. However, I could understand some bits here and there of the German ones, because of my English knowledge.

[Gordon Child]

LoL Brazilian can't even understand potugues from Portugal, so understand German..., sorry i don't trust you

[Sergius Aleksandros]

@Gordon Child Oh no… I am going to have to rethink my whole life because you don’t trust me. You just shattered all my dreams. What am I going to do now? I feel lost.

[Gordon Child]

@Sergius Aleksandros Just stop lying pepito and your whole life will be better... you will still dream even in German

[Sergius Aleksandros]

@Gordon Child I have work to do kid, bye.

[o]

The Romance languages are much more similar to each other than the Germanic languages. Your subjective experience is misleading. French has a particular pronunciation. Italian and Spanish would be much more familiar to you.

[Ed Rosh]

It's good to remember that the more casual English becomes the more 'Germanic' it usually gets. I think that's because of the social stratification. The common folk spoke a more natural to them Germanic language whereas the lords and upper classes had heavy exposure the the Romance languages (being the languages of liturgy, art and science). After the standardization that usually came with mass media (in this case the printed books), the language began to 'level out' and was exposed to the generations of people via dissemination.

[Ognian Kamenov]

Middle French was the language of the elite (French-speaking Danish Normands)

[Czesław Wróbel]

Interesting post. Thanks

[TomTom]

what I have always wanted to ask is if I had a time machine how far could I go back in time and still understand the people of that time and also make myself understood ?

[Uriel R]

As a Spanish speaker (actively learning French) living in an English speaking country, I agree. In regular social conversations people uses words that don't sound like French or Spanish words, they use repetitively certain structures like using "get" for everything. When someone wants to be formal in writing or speaking, I can tell for sure I recognize more words because they sound kind of like Spanish of French. "Fancy" speakers I notice they use much of French vocabulary of course with its adaptation to the English language.

[olivier legendre]

Very, blue, (be)cause, fine, car, push, catch, cry, please, just, etc. are french words... There is always more than you think...

[Emil Z]

Hi Paul! I think English is a Creole language, but English people are too proud to recognize it

[Bryan Krippner]

It WAS a Creole, just like pretty much every language if you go back to the right point in history. A Creole is an intermediate stage in the process of forming a fully-fledged language.

[David Smith]

I'd be interested to know what influence on vocabulary Celtic languages, particularly Welsh, have had on English.

[Charles Warren]

Again, well done. My understanding of modern English is that it's a Teutonic language with Latin roots, that subsequent to the French Invasion of 1066, it incorporated some 10,000 French nouns--everything ending in "ion," for example. I get this from an old textbook.

[Andrea Packard]

I took a couple years of German in high school - and the reason I chose it over French or Spanish was because of its similarity to English. I felt like I already halfway understood it.

[Anthony S. Georgilas]

Interestingly, your surname is Norman.

[Iván Maradona]

Yeah I learned German thanks to my knowledge in English (Second language) extremely similar imo

[Mariana Rovoredo]

So you ended up limiting yourself to germanic languages.

[the lego m]

@Mariana Rovoredo not sure shes limiting herself lol she could know other languages

[IM AYKHARAAD]

The reason why Romance languages may seem difficult or challenging for English speakers is because the conjugation system and sometimes certain points of grammar are different from English (I wouldn’t say the problem of gender because some Germanic languages like German or Dutch have genders). But I feel like English and French (my mother language) share a lot of vocabulary and thus with the other Romance languages. I even think that learning English is useful if a native speaker of Chinese, Korean, Arabic or Russian want to learn French, for example (yeah, also because it shares the same alphabet and because English is the most learned language). So I’m a bit skeptical of saying that it’s easier to learn German, at least in terms of vocabulary. I studied a little bit of German at the university but I didn’t find it that similar. But I may be wrong...

[Mark Lokhorst]

My native language is Dutch and I know some German, Norwegian and French. To me English is definitely a Germanic language. It feels more similar to Dutch than to French. Me knowing English definitely helped me to learn French but it wasn't as easy as other Germanic languages. Dutch has also had a lot of French influence and some words we took from French English doesn't even have, so to say that English is a Romance language is just not right.

[baltuss76]

This is very interesting and informative video. I was always saying that English is like a mutant or hybrid and here we have explanation 🙂 thanks a lot!

[Denver Flores]

Based on the history of English language, yes it is one of the sub-branches of Germanic languages under the Indo-European family of languages

[Marpat_Prepper89]

I'd love to hear more. I see Latin is a Roman language and romance languages are from my understand words "in Roman". And germanic languages and scandanavian languages derived from the same region. And norman came from norse/scandanavian. To me it just seems the English language is the evolutional language of Europe itself.

[Pierre "Reverend PeeSee" Singer]

Awesome work! Congratulations! I agree with you, that English is a hybrid-language. I think, that for the roman countries it was typical, that they only had a small elite of germanic conquerors, which they absorbed. England on the other way was settled by germanic tribes, the angles, jutes and saxons. So we have something, that neither occured to the tradtional Germanic nations (Scandinavia, Netherlands, Germany) which have been never or only short under Romand rule, and also not to the Romance nations, which stayed under roman rule until rome abolished and an elite of germanic warriors took the lead. But England had both, it was roman, but it was completely conquered. On the other hand the mentioned long time until the end of the Hundred years war, when french as school laguage was abolished, had an impression. Also the English tended to take words from other languages, for example Riegel, Kindergarten, Hinterland, Doppelganger and Putsch, the last word ist originally a Swiss word. In Switzerlad by the way the romans which not have been French speaking have been pulled back. In the middle ages the Raetoroman language was presence in whole eastern Switzerland, but no it is only in the state of Graubünden and has very few speakers. The Swiss German is a very pure Alemannic dialect and has only a few french words and no italian or raetoroman words. The difference between England and Switzerland: The swiss conquerors where to numerous so in the assimilation process romance died out in German-Switzerland.

[Hainero2001]

The most interesting part to me is that the people who took French to England, the Normans, were in fact Germanic (Nordic) people themselves who had taken on the French language and many customs. Their forefathers spoke Old Norse. But wait, the plot thickens, because the Franks were also a Germanic people whose forefathers spoke a west Germanic language not dissimilar to OE, but who had taken on the languages of the Romans and the Gauls. So French, in 1066, would itself have been a bit of a hybrid language.

[Askip]

nop

[Terribly Charismatic Duck]

A lot of “French” words that were borrowed into English are actually from Frankish. Even the word “French” is from Frankish.

[Askip]

Terribly Charismatic Duck yep but 80% of the french language is derived of the latin

[Valter Comina]

Hainero2001 awesome!

[Forestal Frank]

@Pâte Nouille: I don't think so and weren't it the Moors who invaded Spain? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors

[Nobody In Particular]

It makes sense that English is a mix between Germanic and Romance languages, as geographically, it is at the linguistic crossover. While English may have Germanic roots and is structured in the same way as other Germanic languages, it has a large romance influence, but I’m saying that English is a Germanic language because of the way in which it is structured, which resembles that of a Germanic language.

[cookiefonster]

english having such a heavy mix of germanic influence and romance influence might be part of why the language is so incredibly widespread today. because of those combined influences, it must be relatively easy to learn for a sizable chunk of the world population

[fray3dendsofsanity]

This explains why English is a great "common universal" language especially in Europe these days, it's the language that most can understand especially the western side. Because if you are Italian, French, Spanish you already understand the vocabulary well...and if you are Dutch, German, Norwegian etc you understand the grammar and syntax, as well as some vocabulary. So it's one of the easiest second languages to learn as you already are familiar with half of English's concepts no matter what