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The funny thing is that partially we can. It's the funniest shit to watch a group of Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian people. Kind of like watching an English speaker somewhat understanding Dutch.

I get the jist of it. With context and congnates and some basic linguistics I can understand what is being said. I feel like I can also read it to a certain degree. If you are a native English speaker and want to feel what's it's like look up someone speaking "Scots" is a sister language to English and probably the closest to English without also being English.

According to a famous quote, a language is a dialect with a navy and an army. Since Murica, UK and Austria each have their own navies amd armies, they are separate languages just like Serbian and Croatian are.

Italian and Spanish are somewhat similar. Though not as similar as Spanish and Portuguese. I know Mexican and Brazilian people all over where I live that can communicate with each other in their own language and they're close enough to understand each other. I'm not sure if that's the case with Italian, though.

jesusfuckingchrist.

Eh, kinda.

I grew up bilingual with English and Spanish. I learned French in school for like 5 years and became fluent in it at the time. I can pretty much understand Italian. And with some effort, I can kind of understand Portuguese. However, I'm intrigued that I understand Italian better than Portuguese considering that Portugal and Spain share the Iberian Peninsula while there is a country between Spain and Italy. Also, it's interesting to me that despite taking 5 years of French and never taking Italian classes, I still understand Italian better than French.

It's kinda funny on a personal level.

My wife is a damn yankee. Moved from up there in forn parts down here to the real america, where we speak proper english.

Anyway, she's been down here a little over ten years. She still runs into situations where she has to ask me "what did he say?" when we go to a family getogether. Like, my cousin might say something that means, "yeah, I was in the woods hunting and saw a bear", but it comes out "I'uz downta the woods ahuntin, and saw a bar". She hears something more like "izadunta tha woods ahntin n sawabar". So, she knows he was in the woods, and was doing something and saw something. But she has no idea what he was doing, or what he saw.

Meanwhile, she's being asked to slow down and relax because everything she says is clipped and a little too fast to keep up with by my more rural family.

Watching her and my great uncle talk is fucking hilarious because there's just this string of gibberish as far as they're both concerned, so they just laugh and essentially say they have no idea what was just said, but that's okay.

Then again, I barely understand my great uncle some days. He's from here in the Appalachians originally, but moved to Alabama to run the farm his wife's family has. As an example of how he sounds, when there's dogs that need to be run off, he has this thing he yells.

It sounds like gehownupouttahyuh. Which is broken down into geh own up outta hyuh, which translates to get on up outta here. But it's one long fucking word for him. Which is how he always talks. It's normally just slower than his dog shooing. If he wants you to know he's going shopping, he says something akin to "ahmagwondownt'thestow" no breaks between words unless it's where a t is a stop, but it's draaawwwwled every vowel is stretched like taffy until it sticks to everything

Not basically. They all ARE English

I cannot imagine that their highschool teacher is at all surprised!

A shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot...

You laugh but I guarantee Spanish is more similar to Portuguese then Scots English is to Cajun English.

Image Transcription: Twitter Post and Replies

User 1

can italians, spanish, and french ppl understand each other

User 2

these are 3 different languages what-

User 1

american and english and australian are different language too they still understand each other

i'm brazilian and i can understand spanish, i just can't speak it. pretty sure i can actually understand spanish better than european portuguese tbh

don't know about italian or french though.

Italian, Spanish, and French ARE all romance languages (descended from the language of Rome, Latin), so she's kinda on to something.

Yes, we can generally understand each other. When my American cousins visit my other cousins in northern Italy, they of course speak English if the Italians know English or Italian if the Americans know Italian, but when some members don't share a common language, they often make a fair conversation with the Americans speaking Spanish and the Italians speaking Italian. They both slow down and try to simplify their vocabulary, but you can generally converse pretty fairly with context clues.

This isn't a dumb question. What she's asking about is known as Mutual Intelligibility or Linguistic Distance, depending on how you read it.

Languages in the same family tend to score well, such as the three Romance languages she listed. Estimates of French <-> Italian are often in the 80% range. That doesn't mean you can speak the other language, but in a bind an average Italian may be able to catch about 80% of what a French person is trying to convey.