To give the language groups for languages currently spoken in Europe as best I can: + Indo-European ++ Germanic +++ North Germanic ++++ Norwegian (Norsk) ++++ Swedish ++++ Danish ++++ Icelandic ++++ Faeroese +++ West Germanic ++++ German ++++ Dutch ++++ Frisian ++++ Luxembourgish ++++ English ++++ Scots ++ Romance +++ Western Romance ++++ Ibero-Romance +++++ Spanish (Castilian) +++++ Galician +++++ Portuguese ++++ Occitano-Romance +++++ Catalan ++++ Gallo-Romance +++++ French +++++ Provençal ++++ Rhaeto-Romance +++++ Romansh ++++ Italo-Dalmatian +++++ Italian +++ Eastern Romance ++++ Romanian ++ Slavic +++ West Slavic ++++ Polish ++++ Czech ++++ Slovak +++ South Slavic ++++ Serbo-Croatian +++++ Serbian +++++ Croatian ++++ Slovene ++++ Bulgarian ++++ Macedonian +++ East Slavic ++++ Ukrainian ++++ Belorussian ++++ Russian ++ Celtic +++ Insular Celtic ++++ Goidelic +++++ Irish +++++ Scots Gaelic +++++ Manx ++++ Brittonic +++++ Welsh +++++ Cornish +++++ Breton ++ Baltic +++ Latvian +++ Lithuanian ++ Greek ++ Albanian ++ Armenian ++ Romani - + Uralic ++ Finnic +++ Finnish +++ Estonian ++ Ugric +++ Hungarian - + Turkic ++ Oghuz +++ Turkish +++ Azerbaijani + Kartvelian ++ Georgian - + Semitic ++ Central Semitic +++ Maltese Then the weirdo with no known family members: + Basque I’ve deliberately focussed on the ones mentioned in the video or which I find personally interesting so there are some that I’ve missed out.
Ulster scots is a germanic language at best and really just english with an northern irish accent definitely not a celtic language.I am irish and trust me a native or fluent english speaker will understand ulster scots 100%
The rythm in Italian comes from the fact that there is a tonic accent 2 syllabs before the last one, in every word of at least 3 - for example : FeDErico, GIUstizia etc. - which makes Italian much more musical and "singing" than French or Spanish (to my french ears 😊).
@@davidpreston9909 Although I live very close to Lower Normandy, in Rennes, I don't know what this accent might sound like... maybe because it's the way I speak 🤔? To me, the most musical French is heard in the Pyrenees or in Lozère. In the video, of course, we hear a "neutral" French spoken by a journalist in Paris...
How languages sounds have nothing to do with the way they relates and are similar. Portuguese sound very different to Spanish bit still is very close to it (89% of lexical similarity). Spanish is closer to Portuguese than it is to Italian (which makes sense geographically), but many people think that Spanish and Italian are more similar because they sound more similar. Linguistically how a language sounds does not means very much. I always found that Greek sounds similar to Spanish, when it is totally different linguistically speaking. Portuguese might have sounds that feel « slavic », there is nothing to do with any slavic relation nor influences at all. Just some evolutions made that some sounds and rythms might feel similar, but totally arbitrary Also, Basque sounds very similar to Spanish, but linguistically has absolutly nothing in common with it. Basque is not a latin language, not even indo-European…
I heard even a Russian guy was stood next to some people and he thought they were speaking Russian, and then he realised it was Portuguese. Very interesting phenomenon.
That is just a small part because most of the languages shown here are national or widely spread regional languages, but there are lots of other less spoken regional languages, which themselves are also divided into lots of dialectal variantions
I'll try to give you some clarifications about the things you've mentioned, though I'm not an expert. First of all, I know you didn't say anything about this but to clarify it just in case, Europe has many languages, many more languages than the ones put in the video. Romance languages, especially, are probably the biggest family in regards of amount of languages in Europe; most of these being found in Spain and Italy. Romantsch is one of them, though it's spoken in Switzerland (and it's actually one of the four official languages). Also what you call ''Moldovan'' which is esentially Romanian. ''Moldovan'' is an artificial designation given by the Soviets to create a different identity to Moldovans from Romanians; just like how they did with Tajiks and Persians. When it comes to the distribution of the language families, you can basically base yourself on the video, as all the languages were put together (like how the Romance languages were put first, then Germanic, etc). You do seem to have a grasp of where most languages are located in the family tree, but I'll give you some clarifications on the ones you might not do: - Basque is a language spoken in Northern Spain and South-West France, but it is not a Romance language. Basque is a language-isolate, meaning that it's not related to any other language in the continent and predates Indo-European colonisation, which is were most European languages got their language from. - Now that Spain is the topic I'll follow by saying that: 1. Galician is not spoken in Southern Spain, it's spoken in North-West Spain in the province of Galicia and 2. The reason why Spain has so many languages is because of the history of the place. Similar to Italy, Spain was just a bunch of kingdoms before the unification in the 15th Century. In Galicians' case it's because it's developed from the same branch as Portuguese, so technically Galician is more related to Portuguese than it is to Spanish. - You've asked about Latin descending from Greek; that didn't happen. Latin evolved from a different migration of Indo-European peoples and some even say that Latin and Celtic were one, but not Greek. Actually, Greek might be more closely related to Armenian, some linguists say. - Albanian, Greek and Armenian are part of the Indo-European language mega-family, but they're ''language isolates'' within the Indo-European family as they are not part of any major Indo-European language family group (Romance, Slavic or Germanic). Also had to mention now that you mentioned Persian and Hindi, they're also part of the Indo-European family, though they have their own language sub-families: Indo-Iranian (Persian) and Indo-Aryan (Hindi) - Scandinavian languages are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, that's it. Some people include Icelandic and Faroese because they're North Germanic as well (though not located in peninsular Scandinavia). I'm writing this comment because of Finnish and Estonian. You did mention it, but these languages are not just a bit different like let's say being from a different language family like Spanish (Romance) and German (Germanic) would be; no, but Finnish, Estonian AND Hungarian are part of a different language MEGA-family, the Finno-Ugric one. The only languages related to them IN ANY WAY, are the Sami languages and some lesser known languages in the vicinity of Europe's border in the Ural Mountains like Udmurt (similar to Finnic languages like Finnish and Estonian) or Khanty (Similar to Ugric languages like Hungarian). - Mentioning Estonian, I have to also explain something about the other two Baltic languages. Baltic languages are part of a small sub-group of the Indo-European mega-family: the Baltic family. Latvian and Lithuanian are both very similar, though Latvian is more Slavic/Russian influenced. Lithuanian, as far as I know didn't get influence from South European languages. - Now that I mentioned Russian let's go to Slavic languages. There's three major branches of them: West Slavic (Polish, Czech and Slovak), East Slavic (Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian) and South Slavic (Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian/Macedonian). Yes, you've heard it, ''Serbo-Croatian'', because the languages spoken in the majority of what is today ex-Yugoslavia are fairly close, most people would say they're the same language. That's why Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Bosnian sounded similar. On the other hand you might've thought Belarusian was Ukrainian because they both evolved from an earlier East Slavic language called Ruthenian. Oh! and Macedonian and Bulgarian are both very similar, some might say they're the same language (though this would also get you into a political talk). - Have to mention Celtic languages as well, as I've seen you were a bit confused when hearing Irish. They indeed have a very distinct sound and they are their own little sub-family located almost exclusively in the British Isles (except Breton, spoken in Brittany, France). - There's very few outliers in Europe that are not Indo-European, I've already mentioned Finno-Ugric languages but there's others. One one hand Turkic languages, like Azerbaijani, Kazakh and Turkish. All of these could barely pass as Europe (well, Turkish rightfully though because of Thrace), but there's other Turkic languages in Europe like Tatar. On the other hand, the small Kartvelian languages spoken exclusively in the Caucasus, the most important one being Georgian. There are also other Caucasian small language families, completely unrelated to anything else, even to Georgian and that's just fascinating. And to finish with the non-Indo-European club you have Maltese. Maltese is actually a Semitic language, related to Arabic and Hebrew though it does have a big influence from Italian and to a lesser extent French and English; but its core is Semitic, and it actually evolved from Arabic itself.
Here's some of the laguages that are missing, I guess because there's no tv outlet that produces news programs using them (this is because they are not insitutionalised enough, some of them have a lot more speakers than some of the languages in the video but their communities aren't given the necessary autonomy from the central state): -Occitan -Breton -Arpitan -Corsican -Sicilian -Sardinian -Neapolitan -Emilian -Romagnol -Piedmontese -Ligurian -Lombard -Venetian -Friulian -Ladin -Aromanian -Frisian -Sami (even though I know there's official news in Sami) -...
You ask why Spain has so many languages, well, all « big » countries in Europe have (or had) different language, often divided in a lots of various dialects. They just had not imposed a too much centralized power enough to erase them as we did unfortunally in France. In France too we have Basque-speaking areas, but regional languages in France are now more like a folkloric thing rather than being really used. This is sad because we have a huge linguistic diversity in France : we have, like Spain a lot of other romance languages than our national language : occitan (with lots of dialects) was spoken in half of the country, Catalan (which actually is considered like almost a dialects of occitan), Corsican, Arpitan… and we also have some non latin languages such as Basque, breton (celtic), and Alsacian (germanic)
wrong at 9:23 you assumed that galicia was near gibraltar but it's on the opposite side, juste above portugal... regardless I couldn't differenciate between an accent from oregon and one from ohio, so...
Italian might sound phonologically and look superficially closer to Spain but in fact Italian is closer to french than to Spanish when look at more deep aspects of language such as lexical similarity and how grammar works. People tend to assume that Italian and Spanish are very similar and that french somehow stands out but it because of the different phonetics. Linguistically it is not the case.
An interesting fact for those who do not know, Cyrillic comes from northern Greece and was created for Bulgaria. Russians did not borrow Cyrillic from Bulgarians for their alphabet until the 17th century. The name refers to the "apostle to the Slavs" - St. Cyril, who together with St. Methodius, while leading a Great Moravian mission among the Slavs, wrote down and introduced the Slavic language into the liturgy. Two alphabets were created to write this language - first the Glagolitic, from which some Cyrillic letters were later borrowed, and then the Cyrillic alphabet. Glagolitic - the oldest known Slavic script, the creation of which is attributed to the missionary-apostle Constantine called Cyril, who, together with his brother Methodius, used it to write down the Slavic language used in the area of Thessaloniki in the 9th century; Glagolitic was the original alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic language, which was to be the liturgical language of the Slavs, and in its later development phase, as the Church Slavonic language, it remained the literary language of the educated classes in the Orthodox faith for many centuries.
I love your enthusiasm for other cultures and languages! If you are interested in why some languages sound like they do, I recommend looking into the topics of phonolgy and phonotactics a bit, I'm sure your mind will be blown by the insight, I now mine was when I first discovered how endlessly fascinating languages and linguistics are. Greetings from Germany!
11:45 one language being older than another isn't really a thing with natural spoken languages, as they all evolve from what came before them. But this is an interesting idea called Aeolism! It is false, they are as related as English and Russian are (though in Greek and Latin they did have a lot of influence between each other due to contact, at least Greek on Latin did), just sharing the Indo-European connection. But there is a great video by a channel called Indo-European that does touch on this subject of Aeolism called 'When Europeans first noticed language simularities'
This is correct, but Latin borrowed many words that express difficult philosophical and scientific concepts, and these in turn passed into many European languages.
47 languages without taking into account many other languages and dialects that aren't officially acknowledged by European countrie's governments, like various Sami languages in Finland, Sweden and Russia or Breton and its dialects, Gallo, Occitan and Provençal dialects and Corsican in France, etc. And if we also consider overseas territories languages it's another big rabbithole. 2:00 Connor would have a blast reacting to the legendary "La Linea", it's total gibberish that sounds like Italian. He could also check out Adriano Celentano "Prisencolinensinainciusol" who did the same thing with english language : ruclips.net/video/48lDffj6rkA/видео.html ruclips.net/video/v5VpczwrSCc/видео.html
Portugueese spunds like russian and spanish like greek. We have the same sounds. The spanish has a lot of words from euskera. The different accent from spain maybe you think it was euskera but it's different. sanskrit - greek - latin is the progression of languages. The english one was so funny hahaha. It's a very difficult game.
More like Polish I would say, they both have nasal sounds, Russian sounds more like vzbzpzvzbzpz + a lot of caveman mumbeling. When I visited Lisbon (after I visited Poland several times) I also very often thought that I hear Polish when someone was talking in distance, it's nasal sounds what makes that connection.
Here's some answers: 4:40 It's because sometimes unrelated languages randomly develop similar phonetics. There's a video of Langfocus about phonetical and tonal similarities between Russian and Portuguese if you want 9:25 No, Galician is spoken in North-West Spain in the region North of Portugal, it's a language closely related to Portuguese, some even define it as a dialect of Portuguese 10:00 Romansh is a romance language spoken in Switzerland, it's one of the four official languages of Switzerland 10:56 It's complicated. In short, most "big" European countries have/had many languages spoken around them, in order to favor a common national identity linguistic minorities were suppressed during history, sometimes violently, sometimes subtly and slowly. All of the big European countries did this at a certain point, in France and Italy the recognition of local languages as being on the same level as the official one is still seen as a threat to national unity, while in Spain after Franco's regime and its brutal suppression of linguistic minorities ended, the new state allowed linguistic communities to regulate their linguistic policies themselves. 12:35 No, Albanian is an Indo-European language and it constitutes its own branch in the indo-european family. Turkish is not an Indoeuropean language, so they are not even remotely related. (Fun fact: to me, an italian speaker, an albanian speaking Italian sometimes sounds like they have an english-speaker accent) 26:15 I suggest a channel called Ecolinguist, they do all this sort of experiments. 34:10 Moldovan is considered to be a dialect of Romanian (this may be a controversial take for some) 36:40 Bro is not getting that we are in the Celtic section ahahaha
I agree with you about Spanish and Italian . Italian sounds so much more animated! I can't wait til you get to Maltese (my mother's language). It's quite the hybrid...😊
Hi greek here, ancient greek were pronounced very differently than modern greek but exactly because of the Roman empire and the adaption of the greek language (at least that's my theory) modern greek sounds exactly like latin is believed to have sounded. But no it's not an offshoot of greek only some of the alphabet. Ps the news report talks about how Angelina Jolie and brad Pitt were trying to save their marriage 😅
lol 😅 The great revolution in the Greek language took place in the Alexandrian times, when the (common) Koine Greek was created from the Attic Athenian dialect, to make it easier for the conquered peoples to learn. It was then that the small letters were created and later the famous Greek Iotacism. Modern Greek in pronunciation is mostly similar to Spanish and other Romance languages.
There a lot, lot more than those ones. Difficult to give a precise number because the difference between languages and dialects is not always clear. The usually accepted number is around 70 different languages and few hundred dialects
Finnish and Estonian are linguistically as close to each other as Spanish and Italian. It's pretty easy to have simple conversation without knowing each other's languages, and also very easy to learn. Estonian has a very strong Germanic influence though, especially in vocabulary. A lot of ethnic Estonians consider themselves Nordic not Baltic since Estonian isn't a Baltic language or nation but instead Finnic like Finland.
It´s not actually a big problem. Many, of not most poltiticians and other decision makers, speak excellent English. Me and my wife went to France in 2001, and was surpriced that how many frenchmen spoke excellent English. And that was more than 20 years ago. Nowadays, I think even more europeans have choosen English as a "lincgua franca". Let me exemplify with Finland: Rufly 5.5 % of the finnish population actually doesn´t have finnish as their first lanuage, but swediish. But still many important finnish polticians belong to the swedish speaking group, including the present prime minister and their "national hero", marschall hero and president Gustaf Mannerheim. But hese people STILL speak the majority language without problems, namely finnish. My step son is working on a norwegian company, and was given the role of "translator", since he speaks not just swedish, but also fluently Engliish and German. I guess this is incomprehensible by most americans, where most people know only one language, namely English.
This gives me an idea for either a skit, or a a premise for a langtuber channel where an American who didn't know any other language than English existed gets exposed to foreign languages. However, instead of finding it off-putting, they're intrigued, and want to know more. And thus the channel is born....
Estonian was very similar to Finnish, and I believe it's the only other language in the Finnish family. Also Luxembourgish sounds like a mix of German and French (which makes sense).
Finnish and Estonian are closest to each other, although Karelian, which is a small language spoken mainly in modern-day Northwestern Russia is even closer to Finnish.
As you may have noticed, the Basque segment doesn't appear alongside the other languages of Spain (Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan) since Basque is spoken in both France and Spain.
Czech is truly squeezed into German speaking areas from almost 3 sides. It's a western Slavic language very similar to Slovak and quite a lot similar to Polish. (They belong in the same language group). For example Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian are Slavic languages too but they belong to the Eastern slavic branch which means that Russians will not understand Czech or Polish. Maybe just a few words which sound similar but very often mean something completely different.
There is also the aspect where they standardized russian in the past, they did it with the influence of the leading class and the nobility who were in love with French. Therefore, the language borrowed a lot of French words that are not used in other Slavic languages, which tend to borrow words from their neighbours.
@@Dqtube It's more like random, language is developing naturally, you can't just adopt some french words as nobility and think that you will change language when there are milions of other speakers who don't care about your snobish words. I would say that other slavic languages very often prefer international variants of words (especially Polish) that are mostly latin origin and thru latin, it came to french and then english, so these words are similar after all, while in Czech, we tend to use our original words more. Germanisms almost disapeared in last 100 years, we keep them pretty much only in slang or regional dialects. When I visited Poland for the first time, I understood a lot of things just becuase of English word is similar, but it doesn't work vice versa, they don't understand Czech word, so I have to think about it and use more international words. Russian is just caveman mumbeling for me, as most of other slavic languages, I don't know who spreaded that nonsense that we understand each other, maybe 150 years ago, but not today.
@@Pidalin Russian has not been normalized from the commonly spoken language and dialects of ordinary people like Czech or Slovak. Where the scholars/linguists of the time studied old literature different, dialects and tried to find as many similarities as possible, analyzed them and wrote them together. In contrast, standardized official Russian was created from above often without regard to those dialects during the 18th century reforms. When the Tsar decided. This nonsense was spread by the lovers of the idea of Pan-Slavism, who exaggerated the situation in Austria-Hungary and would rather be under the rule of the Kremlin than in an independent country. It was then used many times for political propaganda by various pseudo-patriots.
@@Dqtube Neither Czech was standardized from commonly spoken language, it's standardized from archaic translation of Bible, that's why nobody speaks formal standard Czech, it was archaic already when they standardized it.
@@Pidalin Nope, modern Czech is not based on a translation of the Bible. That was its predecessor from before the 19th century. At that time, a reform began that changed some aspects (w>v; ss>š; j>í; g>j; au>ou) from Old Czech used in ‘Bible kralická’. This transformation is evident in works such as ‘Slownjk česko-německý Josefa Jungmanna’ from the first half of the 19th century. Which already included some words from dialects and spoken language that had not been part of the official old language before, but still uses the old format of writing. And ‘Ottův slovník naučný’ from the end of the century, which already used a reformed but not yet fully finalized writing format. This reform in writing is the reason why modern Czech, compared to Polish, does not use W in domestic words. This transformation of language was formally completed in 1902 with the work ‘Pravidla hledící k českému pravopisu a tvarosloví s abecedním seznamem slov a tvarů’by Jan Gebauer, on which the modern grammatical rules are based.
I'm from Russia. And i think we understand in general ukranian and belorussian.Belorussian May be a little bit more. I think they're more close to each other, then russian
It is a nightmare...I speak Portuguese and Russian but not completely fluently so there is always this moment of craziness in my brain when hearing someone for the first time and trying to work out which they are speaking!!!
That's in fact, not much the case. I spend 4 times in Portugal and have had Portugese friends, here in central Europe. If you with the people, there's nothin' that reminds you on Russian...
The Basque country isn't just in Spain, it's in France too. In general, they just went with more details for Spain than many other countries, you have a lot of regional stuff in Germany and France too, for example.
Like Catalan. Most people relates Catalan to Spain only, while it is a language of France too. The french Catalonia is called Roussillon (Perpignan as its capital).
Moldovans speak Romanian. I noticed they missed Flemmish, probably the only 'obvious' language I could think of. Language families are fun - I always like to point out Maltese is the only Semitic language in Europe (same family as Hebrew and Arabic)
As a Lithuanian i can tell you right away that my language has 0% of anything in common with Slavic ones and if Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian were siting in a room the only way for them to communicate would be in English with an exception between Latvian who probably can speak Russian and a Lithuanian older than mid 40s 50s and older and have always lived in a city or just outside the city basically not a rural fella reason being: Long occupation.
I am an italian and in my opinion spanish Is a bit too heavy while french,thought very musical,Is really too fancy,in some moments even funny.Italiam Is the right middle way between the two,with its music but also with its clarity and dignity.One more thing: italian and french are much more alike than you think.
Latin and Greek are very different. Latin comes from Etruscan and Hellenic Greek came down from the Balkans. My wife did Latin and I studied classical Greek - chalk and cheese!
Comunque nell'elenco ne mancano diverse come per esempio : gaugazo, ladino, tataro, yddish, romaní, sardo, friulano, siculo, etc. (sorry I write in Italian, my english is bad 😊 )
LOL Portuguese is celtic-latin. That's why it sounds like slavic. Galicia is above Portugal. Galican is closer to portuguese but, they are starting to sound more spanish-like. Greek is way older then Latin.
9:20 that was strange logic my friend. News reports don’t have to be only about things geographically close. We are talking about Trump’s win at the moment, but it doesn’t mean we’ve moved to the coast off Maine.
So in General most of the European Languages are part of the Indo-European Language family with a couple of exceptions particularly Basque for instance Latin and Greek are not closely related. Latin and Classic Greek do have quite similar grammar but those are general Indo-European features. Latin does have quite a bit of Greek loan words because Greek was a prestige language in the city of Rome and used quite a lot throughout the Empire, particularly in the eastern half of it. Albanian and Armenian are also Indo-European languages but not closely related to any of the larger groups.
4:10 You're not alone with your perception. Pronunciation-wise Portuguese sounds Slavic to me too. But as soon as you focus on the vocabulary you notice it's a Romance language. 🙂 11:40 No, of course not. Latin does not come from Greek. They are from two different branches of the Indo-European language family. 12:25 Albanian is a tricky one. Linguists assume it to be the only surviving representative of the Albanoid branch, which belongs to the Paleo-Balkan group, a recently proposed Indo-European branch comprising the Albanoid or Illyric (Albanian-Messapic), Armenian, and Graeco-Phrygian (Hellenic-Phrygian) subbranches. So it's not a cousin of Turkish. 14:50 Oh, I thought you had a blackout. 🤣🤣🤣 22:30 To me Estonian rather sounds like a Slavic language had a baby with Finnish. 37:20 Yes, the pronunciation has some Italian characteristics and also some of the vocabulary but Maltese is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic. 🙂
Galicia is north of Portugal. Most countries in Europe actually has more than one language but some countries had periods of cultural purges to unify the nation those purges that either didnt go well or happened late was brought back or kept alive in small pockets while those that happened early in history have only one and many are dying out these days as the young dont care much
@@LynxLord1991 Ajá... So following this curious reasoning we could deduce that the Aosta Valley is in the East of France or Alsace in the South of Germany... Right?
@@ializarg Haha there is a big difference here but I see you are the kind of person looking to argue. I however have better things to do, Im sure he could find Galicia by my description so its good enough
14:25 - Welcome to 2025 😀 North Germanic languages sounds like that scene in Bruce Almighty movie from 2003 in that secene when he forced TV reporter to mumble like a caveman. 😀 Except Icelandic, that sounds cool. As a Czech speaker, I like your logic when you guess languages, I do it the same, but I am mostly wrong, like with most of slavic languages, when it sounds totally alien, I always guess Bulgarian and I deny to guess Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian anymore, because I mostly get it wrong and then people are ofended. I can get surely only Slovak and Polish from slavic languages, when I hear vzbzpzvzbzpz then it's probably eastern slavic, but in this case, it was Bulgarian, so I have no idea, I just can't guess them correctly. Croatian is easier, because we go there for summer vacation, so when I hear dobro došli, it's high probability that it's croatian.
Not much, he doesn't know where Romania is. It is about the same distance from Italy as Spain is and he thinks it is further away than Portugal. He has been to Europe so he must have looked at maps. He also thinks at Galicia is in the southeast of Spain. He is clueless.
13:30 I guess that goes for all languages on the news but this type of German (sometimes even referred to as Tagesschau-German) is sooooo overenunciated. All those (different) R sounds stuck out even to me. I always wonder whether there are people who actually speak like that in real life. My regiolect (same dialect) is so much softer. 14:15 Eeeh, it wasn't perfect. Still sounded a bit Dutch. She pronounced the U more like a schwa. Most of the Dutch people I met still have pretty obviously Dutch accents. Another tell is if they pronounce the word come (in English) closer to gomm. 18:00 It *does* sound very German, just not the German you know. It's a Moselle-Franconian dialect and sounds the same on either side of the border (minus some loanwords). Lived in the Rhineland for 4 years, which isn't that close but still sounds similar. I can understand most of it, at least in this news segment. Someone from inner Bavaria, a Rhinelander, someone from Berlin and a person from Switzerland will sound drastically different. Speaking of Switzerland, I never heard Romansh before seeing the original video but it sounds soooooo Swiss. Like a Swiss Latin language (which it is). 23:40 Phonetic patterns tend to cross borders to an extent. To me, Danish sounds rather close to High German, although they're not closely related. If you go South in Germany, you'll start hearing Romance-ish features (meaning regular Romance, not French ^^). Towards the West, there will be some similarities to French. I mentioned the R pronunciation earlier. France was the first country in Europe to develop their R sound (or rather to move through an array of sounds), so it spread the widest there. A century later, the French R started appearing in Germany and whether I am a fringe case or not, I think I might be at the end point of that development (not even a fricative, more like a uvular approximant or somewhere in between) as I know it and I live in NRW. Later (possibly due to significant German influence), the French R found its way into the Danish language. And you'll find literally every R sound known to man within Germany, it's quite fascinating actually. The patterns aren't perfectly obvious but it's a nice example of sounds crossing borders, even if the languages (or language families) do not.
You have an affinity with Scandinavian languages. Guessing Estonian was impressive. Lithuanian and Latvian stem from the same root as Slavic languages (Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European family), so no wonder you may confuse them. Belarusian phonetically and lexically is very close to Ukrainian. Russians, who weren't exposed to Ukrainian and Belarusian, can not understand and speak them. Ukrainians and Belarusians just know Russian (I wish we did not). Moldovan sounds exactly like Romanian because it is the same language (Moldovan is just a dialect of Romanian). It is tough, you did OK.
3:50 Russian😂🤣😂 There is another language spoken in the north of Portugal near Galícia, it's called Mirandês. I'd like to know if the AMERICAN languages still exist, ex: Apache, Sioux, etc
Now you may realise Connor how dimwitted and misleading when Americans refer to people as Europeans with 47 different languages which equates to just about 47 different cultures! Still you elected Trump so I suppose I'm pissing into the wind!!
Maltese sounds Arabic to me, very little Italian there. Also, Irish, Scottish and Welsh never sounded Nordic. They're Celtic, very different than Germanic branch.
To give the language groups for languages currently spoken in Europe as best I can:
+ Indo-European
++ Germanic
+++ North Germanic
++++ Norwegian (Norsk)
++++ Swedish
++++ Danish
++++ Icelandic
++++ Faeroese
+++ West Germanic
++++ German
++++ Dutch
++++ Frisian
++++ Luxembourgish
++++ English
++++ Scots
++ Romance
+++ Western Romance
++++ Ibero-Romance
+++++ Spanish (Castilian)
+++++ Galician
+++++ Portuguese
++++ Occitano-Romance
+++++ Catalan
++++ Gallo-Romance
+++++ French
+++++ Provençal
++++ Rhaeto-Romance
+++++ Romansh
++++ Italo-Dalmatian
+++++ Italian
+++ Eastern Romance
++++ Romanian
++ Slavic
+++ West Slavic
++++ Polish
++++ Czech
++++ Slovak
+++ South Slavic
++++ Serbo-Croatian
+++++ Serbian
+++++ Croatian
++++ Slovene
++++ Bulgarian
++++ Macedonian
+++ East Slavic
++++ Ukrainian
++++ Belorussian
++++ Russian
++ Celtic
+++ Insular Celtic
++++ Goidelic
+++++ Irish
+++++ Scots Gaelic
+++++ Manx
++++ Brittonic
+++++ Welsh
+++++ Cornish
+++++ Breton
++ Baltic
+++ Latvian
+++ Lithuanian
++ Greek
++ Albanian
++ Armenian
++ Romani
-
+ Uralic
++ Finnic
+++ Finnish
+++ Estonian
++ Ugric
+++ Hungarian
-
+ Turkic
++ Oghuz
+++ Turkish
+++ Azerbaijani
+ Kartvelian
++ Georgian
-
+ Semitic
++ Central Semitic
+++ Maltese
Then the weirdo with no known family members:
+ Basque
I’ve deliberately focussed on the ones mentioned in the video or which I find personally interesting so there are some that I’ve missed out.
Ulster scots is a germanic language at best and really just english with an northern irish accent definitely not a celtic language.I am irish and trust me a native or fluent english speaker will understand ulster scots 100%
@@Joseph13163 you’re right, thank you. I got two different dialect families mixed up in my brain. I shall correct
@@productjoe4069 Its an easy mistake to make
@@Joseph13163 it shouldn’t be for a former linguist though ;) still, my specialism was cognitive semantics so I’ll claim that as my shield
Thweer is no Serbo-Croatian, just Croatian and Serbian. Different alphabet, vocabulary and gramathics.
You are not very oriented towards foreign languages but your interest in new cultures deserves encouragement and sympathy.
Shout out to iWrocker
The rythm in Italian comes from the fact that there is a tonic accent 2 syllabs before the last one, in every word of at least 3 - for example : FeDErico, GIUstizia etc. - which makes Italian much more musical and "singing" than French or Spanish (to my french ears 😊).
Not disagreeing, but the Lower Normandy accent, to me, can sound just like singing.
@@davidpreston9909 Although I live very close to Lower Normandy, in Rennes, I don't know what this accent might sound like... maybe because it's the way I speak 🤔? To me, the most musical French is heard in the Pyrenees or in Lozère. In the video, of course, we hear a "neutral" French spoken by a journalist in Paris...
It's fedeRIco and giuSTIzia. Most Italian words have a penultimate syllable stressed.
Luxembourgish sounds like German with a weird French accent.
It is the closest modern language to the frankish language of the middle ages.
@@sungi7814 I did not know that. Cool. Icelandic is the closest to Old Norse from the same time.
Finnish and Estonian are the closest relatives here (of the Uralic language tree).
Hungarian is way out there.
Tervist. Hi from Estonia
Kass Paksu jäi maja räästasse kinni. Greetings from Finland!
The guessing was awesome, made it so much more interesting / fun!
It made the video much more fun for me😊😅im glad people didn't seem to mind
Saying Albanian is Turkish language is bold, almost war starting statement :D Great vid tho!
Zooming out helps to ease up the tensions
Slighly worse tha praising the looks of the Spanish flag when they were showing Catalan.
How languages sounds have nothing to do with the way they relates and are similar. Portuguese sound very different to Spanish bit still is very close to it (89% of lexical similarity). Spanish is closer to Portuguese than it is to Italian (which makes sense geographically), but many people think that Spanish and Italian are more similar because they sound more similar. Linguistically how a language sounds does not means very much. I always found that Greek sounds similar to Spanish, when it is totally different linguistically speaking. Portuguese might have sounds that feel « slavic », there is nothing to do with any slavic relation nor influences at all. Just some evolutions made that some sounds and rythms might feel similar, but totally arbitrary
Also, Basque sounds very similar to Spanish, but linguistically has absolutly nothing in common with it. Basque is not a latin language, not even indo-European…
I strongly recommend Langfocus if you are interested in the origins and the evolution of languages !
I heard even a Russian guy was stood next to some people and he thought they were speaking Russian, and then he realised it was Portuguese. Very interesting phenomenon.
Estonian and finns understand eachother
Ya, it's what cultural diversity looks like
That is just a small part because most of the languages shown here are national or widely spread regional languages, but there are lots of other less spoken regional languages, which themselves are also divided into lots of dialectal variantions
Romanian and Moldovan are officially the same language.
4:08 there's a great and comprehensive video from Langfocus on this exact question! It's titled 'Why does Portugese sound like Russian?! (Or Polish)'
Paul is great, I love his chanel..
ruclips.net/video/Pik2R46xobA/видео.html
I'll try to give you some clarifications about the things you've mentioned, though I'm not an expert.
First of all, I know you didn't say anything about this but to clarify it just in case, Europe has many languages, many more languages than the ones put in the video. Romance languages, especially, are probably the biggest family in regards of amount of languages in Europe; most of these being found in Spain and Italy. Romantsch is one of them, though it's spoken in Switzerland (and it's actually one of the four official languages). Also what you call ''Moldovan'' which is esentially Romanian. ''Moldovan'' is an artificial designation given by the Soviets to create a different identity to Moldovans from Romanians; just like how they did with Tajiks and Persians.
When it comes to the distribution of the language families, you can basically base yourself on the video, as all the languages were put together (like how the Romance languages were put first, then Germanic, etc). You do seem to have a grasp of where most languages are located in the family tree, but I'll give you some clarifications on the ones you might not do:
- Basque is a language spoken in Northern Spain and South-West France, but it is not a Romance language. Basque is a language-isolate, meaning that it's not related to any other language in the continent and predates Indo-European colonisation, which is were most European languages got their language from.
- Now that Spain is the topic I'll follow by saying that: 1. Galician is not spoken in Southern Spain, it's spoken in North-West Spain in the province of Galicia and 2. The reason why Spain has so many languages is because of the history of the place. Similar to Italy, Spain was just a bunch of kingdoms before the unification in the 15th Century. In Galicians' case it's because it's developed from the same branch as Portuguese, so technically Galician is more related to Portuguese than it is to Spanish.
- You've asked about Latin descending from Greek; that didn't happen. Latin evolved from a different migration of Indo-European peoples and some even say that Latin and Celtic were one, but not Greek. Actually, Greek might be more closely related to Armenian, some linguists say.
- Albanian, Greek and Armenian are part of the Indo-European language mega-family, but they're ''language isolates'' within the Indo-European family as they are not part of any major Indo-European language family group (Romance, Slavic or Germanic). Also had to mention now that you mentioned Persian and Hindi, they're also part of the Indo-European family, though they have their own language sub-families: Indo-Iranian (Persian) and Indo-Aryan (Hindi)
- Scandinavian languages are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, that's it. Some people include Icelandic and Faroese because they're North Germanic as well (though not located in peninsular Scandinavia). I'm writing this comment because of Finnish and Estonian. You did mention it, but these languages are not just a bit different like let's say being from a different language family like Spanish (Romance) and German (Germanic) would be; no, but Finnish, Estonian AND Hungarian are part of a different language MEGA-family, the Finno-Ugric one. The only languages related to them IN ANY WAY, are the Sami languages and some lesser known languages in the vicinity of Europe's border in the Ural Mountains like Udmurt (similar to Finnic languages like Finnish and Estonian) or Khanty (Similar to Ugric languages like Hungarian).
- Mentioning Estonian, I have to also explain something about the other two Baltic languages. Baltic languages are part of a small sub-group of the Indo-European mega-family: the Baltic family. Latvian and Lithuanian are both very similar, though Latvian is more Slavic/Russian influenced. Lithuanian, as far as I know didn't get influence from South European languages.
- Now that I mentioned Russian let's go to Slavic languages. There's three major branches of them: West Slavic (Polish, Czech and Slovak), East Slavic (Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian) and South Slavic (Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian/Macedonian). Yes, you've heard it, ''Serbo-Croatian'', because the languages spoken in the majority of what is today ex-Yugoslavia are fairly close, most people would say they're the same language. That's why Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Bosnian sounded similar. On the other hand you might've thought Belarusian was Ukrainian because they both evolved from an earlier East Slavic language called Ruthenian. Oh! and Macedonian and Bulgarian are both very similar, some might say they're the same language (though this would also get you into a political talk).
- Have to mention Celtic languages as well, as I've seen you were a bit confused when hearing Irish. They indeed have a very distinct sound and they are their own little sub-family located almost exclusively in the British Isles (except Breton, spoken in Brittany, France).
- There's very few outliers in Europe that are not Indo-European, I've already mentioned Finno-Ugric languages but there's others. One one hand Turkic languages, like Azerbaijani, Kazakh and Turkish. All of these could barely pass as Europe (well, Turkish rightfully though because of Thrace), but there's other Turkic languages in Europe like Tatar. On the other hand, the small Kartvelian languages spoken exclusively in the Caucasus, the most important one being Georgian. There are also other Caucasian small language families, completely unrelated to anything else, even to Georgian and that's just fascinating. And to finish with the non-Indo-European club you have Maltese. Maltese is actually a Semitic language, related to Arabic and Hebrew though it does have a big influence from Italian and to a lesser extent French and English; but its core is Semitic, and it actually evolved from Arabic itself.
Here's some of the laguages that are missing, I guess because there's no tv outlet that produces news programs using them (this is because they are not insitutionalised enough, some of them have a lot more speakers than some of the languages in the video but their communities aren't given the necessary autonomy from the central state):
-Occitan
-Breton
-Arpitan
-Corsican
-Sicilian
-Sardinian
-Neapolitan
-Emilian
-Romagnol
-Piedmontese
-Ligurian
-Lombard
-Venetian
-Friulian
-Ladin
-Aromanian
-Frisian
-Sami (even though I know there's official news in Sami)
-...
…
- Kashubian
- Sorbian
- Rusyn
- Romani
- Manx
- Cornish
- Bavarian
- Yiddish
- Silesian
France has TV outlets for Bréton and Corsican and Occitan.
-Frankonian
Sorbian
There is actually several Sami languages, not just one.
As an Englishman for a split second i panicked when you didn’t get English straight away then said Polish 😅 My brain said “wait whattt?!?”
I'd like to know if they dub british movies to american language. 😀
I was hoping you'd guess Basque when English popped up.
I like your videos a lot. Greetings from Estonia!
You ask why Spain has so many languages, well, all « big » countries in Europe have (or had) different language, often divided in a lots of various dialects. They just had not imposed a too much centralized power enough to erase them as we did unfortunally in France.
In France too we have Basque-speaking areas, but regional languages in France are now more like a folkloric thing rather than being really used. This is sad because we have a huge linguistic diversity in France : we have, like Spain a lot of other romance languages than our national language : occitan (with lots of dialects) was spoken in half of the country, Catalan (which actually is considered like almost a dialects of occitan), Corsican, Arpitan… and we also have some non latin languages such as Basque, breton (celtic), and Alsacian (germanic)
wrong at 9:23 you assumed that galicia was near gibraltar but it's on the opposite side, juste above portugal... regardless I couldn't differenciate between an accent from oregon and one from ohio, so...
And both Portuguese and Galician have the same linguistic roots.
Italian might sound phonologically and look superficially closer to Spain but in fact Italian is closer to french than to Spanish when look at more deep aspects of language such as lexical similarity and how grammar works. People tend to assume that Italian and Spanish are very similar and that french somehow stands out but it because of the different phonetics. Linguistically it is not the case.
Oh my !!! I thought you did amazingly well! Gosh well done !
An interesting fact for those who do not know, Cyrillic comes from northern Greece and was created for Bulgaria. Russians did not borrow Cyrillic from Bulgarians for their alphabet until the 17th century. The name refers to the "apostle to the Slavs" - St. Cyril, who together with St. Methodius, while leading a Great Moravian mission among the Slavs, wrote down and introduced the Slavic language into the liturgy. Two alphabets were created to write this language - first the Glagolitic, from which some Cyrillic letters were later borrowed, and then the Cyrillic alphabet. Glagolitic - the oldest known Slavic script, the creation of which is attributed to the missionary-apostle Constantine called Cyril, who, together with his brother Methodius, used it to write down the Slavic language used in the area of Thessaloniki in the 9th century; Glagolitic was the original alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic language, which was to be the liturgical language of the Slavs, and in its later development phase, as the Church Slavonic language, it remained the literary language of the educated classes in the Orthodox faith for many centuries.
14:53 it was.
Lithuanian and Latvian belong to the Balto-Slavic family so it's natural to sound like Slavic but different at the same time
Latin didn’t come from Greek, but they are both descendants of proto-Indo-European language like Germanic, Slavic and other languages.
I love your enthusiasm for other cultures and languages! If you are interested in why some languages sound like they do, I recommend looking into the topics of phonolgy and phonotactics a bit, I'm sure your mind will be blown by the insight, I now mine was when I first discovered how endlessly fascinating languages and linguistics are. Greetings from Germany!
Actually American is similar to English because American language came from England
11:45 one language being older than another isn't really a thing with natural spoken languages, as they all evolve from what came before them. But this is an interesting idea called Aeolism! It is false, they are as related as English and Russian are (though in Greek and Latin they did have a lot of influence between each other due to contact, at least Greek on Latin did), just sharing the Indo-European connection. But there is a great video by a channel called Indo-European that does touch on this subject of Aeolism called 'When Europeans first noticed language simularities'
Greek and Latin are related through their Indoeuropean connection, but neither came from the other… they have the same “grandparent”.
This is correct, but Latin borrowed many words that express difficult philosophical and scientific concepts, and these in turn passed into many European languages.
47 languages without taking into account many other languages and dialects that aren't officially acknowledged by European countrie's governments, like various Sami languages in Finland, Sweden and Russia or Breton and its dialects, Gallo, Occitan and Provençal dialects and Corsican in France, etc. And if we also consider overseas territories languages it's another big rabbithole.
2:00 Connor would have a blast reacting to the legendary "La Linea", it's total gibberish that sounds like Italian. He could also check out Adriano Celentano "Prisencolinensinainciusol" who did the same thing with english language :
ruclips.net/video/48lDffj6rkA/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/v5VpczwrSCc/видео.html
34:11 Moldova speaks a varient of Romanian
I miss Frisian from The Netherlands!
Portugueese spunds like russian and spanish like greek. We have the same sounds. The spanish has a lot of words from euskera. The different accent from spain maybe you think it was euskera but it's different. sanskrit - greek - latin is the progression of languages. The english one was so funny hahaha. It's a very difficult game.
langfocus has a video about how portuguese sounds like russian
It's just a coincidence because the "sh" sound is similar. That's it. There's no historical or cultural reason, it's just similar
More like Polish I would say, they both have nasal sounds, Russian sounds more like vzbzpzvzbzpz + a lot of caveman mumbeling. When I visited Lisbon (after I visited Poland several times) I also very often thought that I hear Polish when someone was talking in distance, it's nasal sounds what makes that connection.
18:35 they all stem from the same language, old Norse!
Here's some answers:
4:40 It's because sometimes unrelated languages randomly develop similar phonetics. There's a video of Langfocus about phonetical and tonal similarities between Russian and Portuguese if you want
9:25 No, Galician is spoken in North-West Spain in the region North of Portugal, it's a language closely related to Portuguese, some even define it as a dialect of Portuguese
10:00 Romansh is a romance language spoken in Switzerland, it's one of the four official languages of Switzerland
10:56 It's complicated. In short, most "big" European countries have/had many languages spoken around them, in order to favor a common national identity linguistic minorities were suppressed during history, sometimes violently, sometimes subtly and slowly. All of the big European countries did this at a certain point, in France and Italy the recognition of local languages as being on the same level as the official one is still seen as a threat to national unity, while in Spain after Franco's regime and its brutal suppression of linguistic minorities ended, the new state allowed linguistic communities to regulate their linguistic policies themselves.
12:35 No, Albanian is an Indo-European language and it constitutes its own branch in the indo-european family. Turkish is not an Indoeuropean language, so they are not even remotely related. (Fun fact: to me, an italian speaker, an albanian speaking Italian sometimes sounds like they have an english-speaker accent)
26:15 I suggest a channel called Ecolinguist, they do all this sort of experiments.
34:10 Moldovan is considered to be a dialect of Romanian (this may be a controversial take for some)
36:40 Bro is not getting that we are in the Celtic section ahahaha
I agree with you about Spanish and Italian . Italian sounds so much more animated! I can't wait til you get to Maltese (my mother's language). It's quite the hybrid...😊
12:30 it makes its own branch of Indo-European just like Armenian and Greek do. Turkish is a Turkic language, so not Indo-European
In Moldova they speak Romanian. Is like German in Austria or Switzerland! There's no Moldovian language!
Romanian language is a latin language, similar with italian.
Two Scandinavian languages not mentioned, spoken in Sweden:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutnish
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfdalian
Hi greek here, ancient greek were pronounced very differently than modern greek but exactly because of the Roman empire and the adaption of the greek language (at least that's my theory) modern greek sounds exactly like latin is believed to have sounded. But no it's not an offshoot of greek only some of the alphabet. Ps the news report talks about how Angelina Jolie and brad Pitt were trying to save their marriage 😅
lol 😅
The great revolution in the Greek language took place in the Alexandrian times, when the (common) Koine Greek was created from the Attic Athenian dialect, to make it easier for the conquered peoples to learn. It was then that the small letters were created and later the famous Greek Iotacism.
Modern Greek in pronunciation is mostly similar to Spanish and other Romance languages.
I didn’t even realise there were so many European languages I feel like I’m having a stroke 😅
There a lot, lot more than those ones. Difficult to give a precise number because the difference between languages and dialects is not always clear. The usually accepted number is around 70 different languages and few hundred dialects
I must say, you have very good knowledge about geography and languages. For an American, that is. 😄
Finnish and Estonian are linguistically as close to each other as Spanish and Italian. It's pretty easy to have simple conversation without knowing each other's languages, and also very easy to learn. Estonian has a very strong Germanic influence though, especially in vocabulary. A lot of ethnic Estonians consider themselves Nordic not Baltic since Estonian isn't a Baltic language or nation but instead Finnic like Finland.
It´s not actually a big problem. Many, of not most poltiticians and other decision makers, speak excellent English. Me and my wife went to France in 2001, and was surpriced that how many frenchmen spoke excellent English. And that was more than 20 years ago. Nowadays, I think even more europeans have choosen English as a "lincgua franca". Let me exemplify with Finland: Rufly 5.5 % of the finnish population actually doesn´t have finnish as their first lanuage, but swediish. But still many important finnish polticians belong to the swedish speaking group, including the present prime minister and their "national hero", marschall hero and president Gustaf Mannerheim. But hese people STILL speak the majority language without problems, namely finnish. My step son is working on a norwegian company, and was given the role of "translator", since he speaks not just swedish, but also fluently Engliish and German. I guess this is incomprehensible by most americans, where most people know only one language, namely English.
If Spanish or Italian are cousin languages, Catalan which is basically an Occitan language, is a sibling language of French
All romance languages are equally cousins
This gives me an idea for either a skit, or a a premise for a langtuber channel where an American who didn't know any other language than English existed gets exposed to foreign languages. However, instead of finding it off-putting, they're intrigued, and want to know more. And thus the channel is born....
Estonian was very similar to Finnish, and I believe it's the only other language in the Finnish family. Also Luxembourgish sounds like a mix of German and French (which makes sense).
Finnish and Estonian are closest to each other, although Karelian, which is a small language spoken mainly in modern-day Northwestern Russia is even closer to Finnish.
There's no Moldovan (or Moldovian) language. They speak Romanian.
They always forget Elfdalian
As you may have noticed, the Basque segment doesn't appear alongside the other languages of Spain (Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan) since Basque is spoken in both France and Spain.
Albanian is an indo-european language however its not part of any of the major branches like germanic or latin, it is its own thing.
Czech is truly squeezed into German speaking areas from almost 3 sides. It's a western Slavic language very similar to Slovak and quite a lot similar to Polish. (They belong in the same language group). For example Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian are Slavic languages too but they belong to the Eastern slavic branch which means that Russians will not understand Czech or Polish. Maybe just a few words which sound similar but very often mean something completely different.
There is also the aspect where they standardized russian in the past, they did it with the influence of the leading class and the nobility who were in love with French. Therefore, the language borrowed a lot of French words that are not used in other Slavic languages, which tend to borrow words from their neighbours.
@@Dqtube It's more like random, language is developing naturally, you can't just adopt some french words as nobility and think that you will change language when there are milions of other speakers who don't care about your snobish words. I would say that other slavic languages very often prefer international variants of words (especially Polish) that are mostly latin origin and thru latin, it came to french and then english, so these words are similar after all, while in Czech, we tend to use our original words more. Germanisms almost disapeared in last 100 years, we keep them pretty much only in slang or regional dialects.
When I visited Poland for the first time, I understood a lot of things just becuase of English word is similar, but it doesn't work vice versa, they don't understand Czech word, so I have to think about it and use more international words. Russian is just caveman mumbeling for me, as most of other slavic languages, I don't know who spreaded that nonsense that we understand each other, maybe 150 years ago, but not today.
@@Pidalin Russian has not been normalized from the commonly spoken language and dialects of ordinary people like Czech or Slovak. Where the scholars/linguists of the time studied old literature different, dialects and tried to find as many similarities as possible, analyzed them and wrote them together. In contrast, standardized official Russian was created from above often without regard to those dialects during the 18th century reforms. When the Tsar decided.
This nonsense was spread by the lovers of the idea of Pan-Slavism, who exaggerated the situation in Austria-Hungary and would rather be under the rule of the Kremlin than in an independent country. It was then used many times for political propaganda by various pseudo-patriots.
@@Dqtube Neither Czech was standardized from commonly spoken language, it's standardized from archaic translation of Bible, that's why nobody speaks formal standard Czech, it was archaic already when they standardized it.
@@Pidalin Nope, modern Czech is not based on a translation of the Bible. That was its predecessor from before the 19th century. At that time, a reform began that changed some aspects (w>v; ss>š; j>í; g>j; au>ou) from Old Czech used in ‘Bible kralická’. This transformation is evident in works such as ‘Slownjk česko-německý Josefa Jungmanna’ from the first half of the 19th century. Which already included some words from dialects and spoken language that had not been part of the official old language before, but still uses the old format of writing. And ‘Ottův slovník naučný’ from the end of the century, which already used a reformed but not yet fully finalized writing format. This reform in writing is the reason why modern Czech, compared to Polish, does not use W in domestic words. This transformation of language was formally completed in 1902 with the work ‘Pravidla hledící k českému pravopisu a tvarosloví s abecedním seznamem slov a tvarů’by Jan Gebauer, on which the modern grammatical rules are based.
18:00 it's like German with a lot of influence from French!
I've been learning Finnish for nine years. It's probably my favourite language that I've encountered.
I'm from Russia. And i think we understand in general ukranian and belorussian.Belorussian May be a little bit more. I think they're more close to each other, then russian
You are right, Portuguese sounds slavic or russian.
Agreed.
see: r/PORTUGALCYKABLYAT
It is a nightmare...I speak Portuguese and Russian but not completely fluently so there is always this moment of craziness in my brain when hearing someone for the first time and trying to work out which they are speaking!!!
That's in fact, not much the case. I spend 4 times in Portugal and have had Portugese friends, here in central Europe. If you with the people, there's nothin' that reminds you on Russian...
The Basque country isn't just in Spain, it's in France too. In general, they just went with more details for Spain than many other countries, you have a lot of regional stuff in Germany and France too, for example.
Like Catalan. Most people relates Catalan to Spain only, while it is a language of France too. The french Catalonia is called Roussillon (Perpignan as its capital).
The cool thing is that each language has its own specific vibration and warmth or cold.
Estonian and finnish are very similar you'd notice if you listened to them side by side so to speak
you are the only youtuber that i hear saying Portuguese sound Russian. 🙂 i heard you saying that so many time.
Wow Connor impressive how you got all the Scandinavian languages
Spain is the unification of several kingdom/countries with different languages and cultures, it's not a mono-cultural country.
When I first heard Portuguese I thought it was a mixture of Spanish and Polish
Proud of you for recognizing swedish
just lucky guess 😀
Moldovans speak Romanian. I noticed they missed Flemmish, probably the only 'obvious' language I could think of.
Language families are fun - I always like to point out Maltese is the only Semitic language in Europe (same family as Hebrew and Arabic)
As a Lithuanian i can tell you right away that my language has 0% of anything in common with Slavic ones and if Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian were siting in a room the only way for them to communicate would be in English with an exception between Latvian who probably can speak Russian and a Lithuanian older than mid 40s 50s and older and have always lived in a city or just outside the city basically not a rural fella reason being: Long occupation.
I am an italian and in my opinion spanish Is a bit too heavy while french,thought very musical,Is really too fancy,in some moments even funny.Italiam Is the right middle way between the two,with its music but also with its clarity and dignity.One more thing: italian and french are much more alike than you think.
Latin and Greek are very different. Latin comes from Etruscan and Hellenic Greek came down from the Balkans. My wife did Latin and I studied classical Greek - chalk and cheese!
Dont worry Connor, you did well😊 for someone who have good knolwedge of geography and never heard some language at all.
Comunque nell'elenco ne mancano diverse come per esempio : gaugazo, ladino, tataro, yddish, romaní, sardo, friulano, siculo, etc. (sorry I write in Italian, my english is bad 😊 )
Romansch one of the oficial languages in Switzerland! Sound like a mix of Italian and German!
LOL
Portuguese is celtic-latin.
That's why it sounds like slavic.
Galicia is above Portugal.
Galican is closer to portuguese but, they are starting to sound more spanish-like.
Greek is way older then Latin.
9:20 that was strange logic my friend. News reports don’t have to be only about things geographically close. We are talking about Trump’s win at the moment, but it doesn’t mean we’ve moved to the coast off Maine.
Sorry, Spaniards, but there is nothing more beautiful than a Spanish accent but from Cuba. A pure sexy twist to a hot Cuban night XD
So in General most of the European Languages are part of the Indo-European Language family with a couple of exceptions particularly Basque for instance
Latin and Greek are not closely related. Latin and Classic Greek do have quite similar grammar but those are general Indo-European features. Latin does have quite a bit of Greek loan words because Greek was a prestige language in the city of Rome and used quite a lot throughout the Empire, particularly in the eastern half of it.
Albanian and Armenian are also Indo-European languages but not closely related to any of the larger groups.
4:10 You're not alone with your perception. Pronunciation-wise Portuguese sounds Slavic to me too. But as soon as you focus on the vocabulary you notice it's a Romance language. 🙂
11:40 No, of course not. Latin does not come from Greek. They are from two different branches of the Indo-European language family.
12:25 Albanian is a tricky one. Linguists assume it to be the only surviving representative of the Albanoid branch, which belongs to the Paleo-Balkan group, a recently proposed Indo-European branch comprising the Albanoid or Illyric (Albanian-Messapic), Armenian, and Graeco-Phrygian (Hellenic-Phrygian) subbranches.
So it's not a cousin of Turkish.
14:50 Oh, I thought you had a blackout. 🤣🤣🤣
22:30 To me Estonian rather sounds like a Slavic language had a baby with Finnish.
37:20 Yes, the pronunciation has some Italian characteristics and also some of the vocabulary but Maltese is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic.
🙂
This is why we made the World speak English. to make sure the UK didn't have to learn Languages.
Well they're all so HARD!
😂
@@Escapee5931 Yes, and we are useless at learning Languages.
"I meant Danish, not Dutch."
We get that a lot.
Galicia is north of Portugal. Most countries in Europe actually has more than one language but some countries had periods of cultural purges to unify the nation those purges that either didnt go well or happened late was brought back or kept alive in small pockets while those that happened early in history have only one and many are dying out these days as the young dont care much
Galicia is Northwest of Spain.
@@ializarg Yes north of Portugal
@@LynxLord1991 Ajá...
So following this curious reasoning we could deduce that the Aosta Valley is in the East of France or Alsace in the South of Germany...
Right?
@@ializarg Haha there is a big difference here but I see you are the kind of person looking to argue. I however have better things to do, Im sure he could find Galicia by my description so its good enough
14:25 - Welcome to 2025 😀
North Germanic languages sounds like that scene in Bruce Almighty movie from 2003 in that secene when he forced TV reporter to mumble like a caveman. 😀 Except Icelandic, that sounds cool. As a Czech speaker, I like your logic when you guess languages, I do it the same, but I am mostly wrong, like with most of slavic languages, when it sounds totally alien, I always guess Bulgarian and I deny to guess Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian anymore, because I mostly get it wrong and then people are ofended. I can get surely only Slovak and Polish from slavic languages, when I hear vzbzpzvzbzpz then it's probably eastern slavic, but in this case, it was Bulgarian, so I have no idea, I just can't guess them correctly. Croatian is easier, because we go there for summer vacation, so when I hear dobro došli, it's high probability that it's croatian.
Latin does not come at all from greek bit did borrowed lot of vocabulary from greek.
this is the first American guy who has any knowledge about geography… congrats!
Well, I mean, he said that Gibraltar is in the south-eastern part of Spain, he's still missing something...
Not much, he doesn't know where Romania is. It is about the same distance from Italy as Spain is and he thinks it is further away than Portugal. He has been to Europe so he must have looked at maps. He also thinks at Galicia is in the southeast of Spain. He is clueless.
12:30 Albanian is its own thing
13:30 I guess that goes for all languages on the news but this type of German (sometimes even referred to as Tagesschau-German) is sooooo overenunciated.
All those (different) R sounds stuck out even to me. I always wonder whether there are people who actually speak like that in real life. My regiolect (same dialect) is so much softer.
14:15 Eeeh, it wasn't perfect. Still sounded a bit Dutch. She pronounced the U more like a schwa.
Most of the Dutch people I met still have pretty obviously Dutch accents. Another tell is if they pronounce the word come (in English) closer to gomm.
18:00 It *does* sound very German, just not the German you know. It's a Moselle-Franconian dialect and sounds the same on either side of the border (minus some loanwords). Lived in the Rhineland for 4 years, which isn't that close but still sounds similar. I can understand most of it, at least in this news segment. Someone from inner Bavaria, a Rhinelander, someone from Berlin and a person from Switzerland will sound drastically different. Speaking of Switzerland, I never heard Romansh before seeing the original video but it sounds soooooo Swiss. Like a Swiss Latin language (which it is).
23:40 Phonetic patterns tend to cross borders to an extent. To me, Danish sounds rather close to High German, although they're not closely related. If you go South in Germany, you'll start hearing Romance-ish features (meaning regular Romance, not French ^^). Towards the West, there will be some similarities to French. I mentioned the R pronunciation earlier. France was the first country in Europe to develop their R sound (or rather to move through an array of sounds), so it spread the widest there. A century later, the French R started appearing in Germany and whether I am a fringe case or not, I think I might be at the end point of that development (not even a fricative, more like a uvular approximant or somewhere in between) as I know it and I live in NRW. Later (possibly due to significant German influence), the French R found its way into the Danish language. And you'll find literally every R sound known to man within Germany, it's quite fascinating actually. The patterns aren't perfectly obvious but it's a nice example of sounds crossing borders, even if the languages (or language families) do not.
latin didn't came from latin. it's may be influenced later, but it's more from Etruscan origine, i guess.
There is video about russian and portuguese by the channel Langfocus
laten originated in central italy , the area where rome is today . in the 6th century BCE
Galicia is above portugal, north western part of spain
You have an affinity with Scandinavian languages. Guessing Estonian was impressive. Lithuanian and Latvian stem from the same root as Slavic languages (Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European family), so no wonder you may confuse them. Belarusian phonetically and lexically is very close to Ukrainian. Russians, who weren't exposed to Ukrainian and Belarusian, can not understand and speak them. Ukrainians and Belarusians just know Russian (I wish we did not). Moldovan sounds exactly like Romanian because it is the same language (Moldovan is just a dialect of Romanian). It is tough, you did OK.
3:50 Russian😂🤣😂
There is another language spoken in the north of Portugal near Galícia, it's called Mirandês.
I'd like to know if the AMERICAN languages still exist, ex: Apache, Sioux, etc
Now you may realise Connor how dimwitted and misleading when Americans refer to people as Europeans with 47 different languages which equates to just about 47 different cultures! Still you elected Trump so I suppose I'm pissing into the wind!!
Maltese sounds Arabic to me, very little Italian there. Also, Irish, Scottish and Welsh never sounded Nordic. They're Celtic, very different than Germanic branch.
I think the sound all alike the sound very similar to each other but I think Russian language sounds like old English very much
Now imagine how hard it is to make a union with all of this 😭
A'gas heveli dhe kavos hireth a-dro unn kopel ;)
Rough Translation, you seem to have forgotten about a couple.