Spanish and Italian, why are they so similar?

“Chao como estas?”

“Ciao come stai?”

Even to a person who doesn’t speak neither Italian or Spanish these two sentences sound very similar. It is known to basically everyone that Spanish and Italian sound very alike, but I would argue that is basically the same language.

In Italy, you are required to choose a language (apart form English, of course) to take in middle school. The most popular choices are either French or Spanish. I, of course following my life philosophy of “work smarter, not harder”, chose Spanish. I though it would be an easy ride given that I knew already that the languages were very similar so I wouldn’t have to work as much as learning French. Given that, I was not stressing that much about the class, but as the first lesson came around, I was surprised how the teacher could talk in Spanish and me and all my classmates could understand her perfectly. Someone could have a full conversation in Spanish in front of me and, yes, maybe I wouldn’t be able to reply in Spanish, but I could understand what they were saying, or at least the main point of it.

As I continued taking Spanish for three years, I realized I had to put in some effort for learning verbs and special adjectives that were a little different from Italian, but overall, I knew if I couldn’t come up with a word, half of the times I could just say it in Italian and it would still make sense. There were, though, a couple words who had a totally different meaning in Spanish than they had in Italian, in fact, my favorite one is “burro” which means “donkey” in Spanish, but in Italian it means “butter”.

When I finished middle school, I was presented with the choice to continue learning Spanish in high school, but I decided not to take it as I was already taking after school classes in English and wanted to focus only on that language. Now though, being in the United States, I regret that choice. I found out that basically half the population of the United States knows Spanish, but somehow, at least for those who know it as a second language, they cannot understand Italian. So why can I understand Spanish, as it is not my second, but my third language, and those who speak Spanish as their second language cannot understand me when I talk in my native language? I know for a fact that native Spanish speakers can understand Italian, as my brother has been to Spain multiple times not knowing a word of Spanish, he told me that there was never a problem communicating as the languages are so similar there are only a few differences.

I tried to continue to learn Spanish when I came to the U.S. by taking a Spanish class. It wasn’t the hardest Spanish class they had at my school, but then again, I was really trying to get that easy A (as I said before, work smarter not harder). Two weeks into the class, though, the teacher told me I didn’t need to take the class and I should switch to either AP Spanish or to another language, so, still following my philosophy of life, I took Anatomy. I quickly found out that that class required me to do more work, until we I came across the chapters about muscles and bones. All the terms were basically the English way of saying an Italian word, so I already knew most of them. I started to wonder why, though, would English ever get their words from Italian? Then it came to me: Latin, one of the oldest languages of them all. And what other language comes from Latin? You got it, Spanish. Maybe that’s why they’re so similar. But then again, French comes from Spanish too, and I can’t understand a word of it, so what’s the difference?

From a quick Google search, I found out that French is not one of the closest languages to Latin, while Romanian, Italian, and Spanish are (Dass, 2014.) Now, if you absolutely suck at geography like me, you may not know where Romania is. But regardless, I translated a couple of sentences on Google Translator to see if I would be able to understand them, but I couldn’t. In fact, the article explains that yes, Romanian is the closest language to Latin, but Italian and Spanish are the closest in pronunciation, which would explain why we can understand each other without really knowing the other language.

Dass, J. (2014, January 01). What living language is the closest to Latin? Retrieved from http://jessepaedia.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-living-language-is-closest-to-latin.html