The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
Closest Major Language: Dutch
Like Frisian and English, Dutch is another West Germanic language that developed from Proto-Germanic. Because of this, Dutch possesses many words and phrases similar to English and has a similar grammatical structure.
In comparison, Spanish and English have a lexical similarity of only 30-50%, and French and English of only 40-50%. That's because not only are the Spanish and French languages neighbors, but from the same family of romance languages.
Informal English is definitely closer to German than French, but the more formal you get, the more French-like it is going to become because of the increased per cent of French vocabulary used in formal English.
Dutch is the most similar language to English. Sometime it is said that dutch is the language between English and German. Some other languages are similar to English , like :- German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Swedish, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian and Norwegian.
Australian accent also features flapping. This is the softening of /t/ in the middle of words or at the end of words between vowels. When the “t” sound is flapped, it'll sound a lot more like a soft /d/ sound. Therefore “letter” /lɛtə/ may at times sound like “ledder” /lɛɾʌ/.
The most mutually intelligible pair is Spanish and Portuguese. In some cases, TV stations don't even translate between the two languages, instead assuming that Spanish-speaking audiences would understand Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking audiences would understand Spanish.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Norwegian
This may come as a surprise, but we have ranked Norwegian as the easiest language to learn for English speakers. Norwegian is a member of the Germanic family of languages — just like English!
One of the main reasons for the English and German language relationship and their similarities is because English is a language which originated from West Germanic at least 2,000 years ago. This means German and English are both members of the family of Indo-European languages' Germanic branch.
In fact, Spanish actually antedates English in the areas that now make up the composite United States — a fact that surprises many Americans. In terms of continuity and longevity in the United States, the Spanish language is second only to Native American languages that were spoken for centuries prior to colonization.
Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus principally spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Through trade, invasions and conquest, the Aramaic language had spread far afield by the 7th century B.C., and would become the lingua franca in much of the Middle East.
1. English (1,132 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the largest language in the world for both native and non-native speaker. Like Latin or Greek at the time, English is the universal language of today.
The Chinese language is vastly different from English, which is one reason why English speakers have a hard time learning it. Chinese has a different writing system. It has a different sound and pronunciation style. It also has different grammar.
2. Arabic. Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.
Generally, if you're an English speaker with no exposure to other languages, here are some of the most challenging and difficult languages to learn: Mandarin Chinese. Arabic. Vietnamese.
First Language
Mandarin Chinese tops the list of most commonly spoken native languages with 870 million native speakers. With less than 200 million second language speakers, the vast majority of Mandarin speakers are native and also located in mainland China.
Answer: Thankfully, your brain can definitely handle learning two (or more!) languages at once! (Two down, 6,998 to go.) But there are also some ways you can make this linguistic task easier on yourself.
Easiest (about 600 hours of study)
Of these, Spanish and Italian are the easiest for native English speakers to learn, followed by Portuguese and finally French.
The most widely accepted theory to why Australians have the accent they do is that the first Australian born children (of the colonizers, not the natives obviously) simply created the first trace of the recognizable accent amongst themselves naturally.