Frespañol or frespagnol (also known as frañol or fragnol) is a portmanteau of the words français (or francés in Spanish) and español, which mean French and Spanish mixed together, usually in informal settings.
No. Catalan is a language in its own right. It does not derive from Spanish, or even from French, even though many people say that Catalan sounds like a mixture of both. Catalan evolved directly from common Latin.
No. Portuguese is an old language and the written form can be dated back to the 12th century. Vulgar Latin, which was spoken on the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula, (now Portugal and the Spanish province of Galicia) basically replaced all previous local languages.
Well, French and Spanish are both Romance languages, or languages descended from Vulgar Latin, or the colloquial Latin spoken among the lower classes of the Roman Empire. Spanish and French evolved from local variants of Latin over hundreds of years, eventually becoming the distinct languages we know them as today.
The Romance languages are a group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.
Catalan can be considered a close relative of both French and Spanish. However, after several centuries, Catalan has evolved well enough to develop its own structure and grammatical norms, and it operates independently from the evolution and current state of Spanish, French, and other Romance languages.
Catalan is sometimes more similar to French than Spanish
Although Catalan, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and many other European languages have their origins in Latin (these are known as Romance languages), each has evolved in its own way.
What two languages are the most similar? Spanish and Portuguese are the most mutually understandable pair. In certain circumstances, television stations do not even translate between the two languages, presuming that Spanish-speaking viewers will understand Portuguese and vice versa.
According to this metric, French and Italian are 89 percent similar, which makes them as similar as Spanish and Portuguese. No other language pairings in this family go above 89 percent.
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.
Romance languages. noun. spoken and written forms of communication that share a root in the Latin language: Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, and Romanian.
In all aspects—phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax—Portuguese is essentially the result of an organic evolution of Vulgar Latin with some influences from other languages, namely the native Gallaecian and Lusitanian languages spoken prior to the Roman domination.
Corsican (corsu [ˈkorsu], [ˈkɔrsu]; full name: lingua corsa [ˈliŋɡwa ˈɡorsa], [ˈliŋɡwa ˈɡɔrsa]) is a Romance language constituted by the continuum of the Italo-Dalmatian dialects spoken on the Mediterranean island of Corsica (France) and on the northern end of the island of Sardinia (Italy).
For those who have heard Catalan people pronounce it as "Barthelona", that was probably because they were speaking Spanish: in the variety of Spanish spoken in Catalonia it is pronounced "Barthelona".
Catalan is most closely related to the Occitan language of southern France and to Spanish, but it is clearly distinct from both.
Based on lexical similarity, you will find that Portuguese is the closest to Spanish. Just remember that you will need to rethink the way the words are pronounced. You will also want to know which words are different between the languages. Following Portuguese is Italian as the second closest language to Spanish.
Portuguese. In the north-western part of Spain, Galicia is the mother-land of the Portuguese mother tongue. It's widely considered the closest language to Spanish – the lexical similarity is approximated at 89%.
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.
Spanish is the second most widely spoken language globally in terms of native speakers. In addition, it is the most spoken of the Romance languages and the third most used on the internet.
English takes the crown as the most common second language around the world with 55 countries speaking it as a second language. France and Russia are second and third with 14 and 13 respectively. The languages are grouped and colour-coded by language family (languages with a common ancestor).
Catalan. A little over 15 percent of the Spanish population speak some form of Catalan, while only 8.5 percent call it their mother tongue. The Romance language Catalan has its name from the region of Catalonia in the northeast of Spain and adjoining parts of France.
Catalan in the multilingual Spain
Besides Castilian, Galician and Basque, Catalan is one out of four official languages in Spain. Approximately 40% of the Spanish population live in areas with two official languages. About 28% live in regions with Catalan as the official language.
Most Catalan speakers know Spanish because they studied it at school, but Spanish speakers, who haven't learned Catalan, are unable to comprehend any Catalan. Catalan is a language spoken in Catalonia, Andorra, and some parts of France and Italy. There are Catalan dialects.