Spanish & English Language Similarities

To What Extent is the English Language Linguistically Similar to the Spanish Language?



‘Mi método favorito de transporte es el tren, especialmente los a Madrid que son excepcionalmente rápidos.’



Looking at this sentence it would be fair to say that English and Spanish are evidently quite similar linguistically; you need not have any command of Spanish to understand that Madrid trains are very quick. Considering then that both languages use the Roman alphabet, share 30-40% related words and take the same basic grammatical structures, you wouldn’t be mistaken to say that they are actually very similar indeed, particularly in comparison with such distant languages as Russian or Japanese. Nonetheless, both languages are unique, possessing their own, individual quirks and charms which can make learning them a little harder than you might think.

         Firstly, Spanish is a Romance language whereas English is Germanic with a wide variety of linguistic features descending from French and Anglo-Saxon and Celtic languages. The effect of this mixture of tongues on English is that it has given us a wide range of synonyms which are not necessarily present in Spanish; it is difficult to convey the differences between the Old English ‘kingly’, the Latin ‘regal’ and the French ‘royal’ in Spanish as easily as we can in English. However both English and Spanish have been greatly influenced by Latin, this is clear in grammar and some vocabulary, e.g. ‘pensativo’ and ‘pensive’, and it is this root language which has given us a common alphabet. With nearly everything involving languages, there are irregularities. In this case it is ‘ll’ and ‘ñ’ e.g. ‘llegar’, ‘niño’, which in Spanish are considered separate letters, and the presence of accents in Spanish e.g. ‘automóvil’, usually to indicate stress or to distinguish homonyms.

         Secondly, Spanish may sound very unusual and fairly incomprehensible to an untrained ear, with such radical phonemic differences as the letters ‘j’, ‘z’ and ‘v’ making hard ‘h’, ‘th’ and ‘b’ sounds respectively, yet if you learn a few simple rules, Spanish pronunciation appears delightfully logical, where every letter is pronounced and pronounced as it sounds. One of the toughest problems for Spaniards learning English is clearly vowel sounds; whereas in Spanish only five vowel sounds exist, in English we have more than 14 (depending on regional accents) to pick from; language learners have to remember the differences between ‘enough’, ‘though’, ‘course’, ‘through’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘cough’, ‘pronounce’… Furthermore, Spanish lacks many consonant sounds which are used regularly in English, e.g. ‘sh’, ‘ps’, ‘ng’ and ‘sts’, and it drops the silent letters of English altogether, e.g. ‘ritmo’/’rhythm’ and ‘salmo’/’psalm’.

Spanish is also distinctive in its use of double consonants in that the only consonants capable of doubling are ‘c’, ‘n’ and ‘r’ e.g. ‘acción’, ‘irrigación’ and ‘innecesario’, therefore the English words ‘possible’, ‘illegal’ and ‘different’ must become ‘posible’, ‘ilegal’ and ‘diferente’ respectively.

The largest similarity between the two tongues is lexis. The many cognates, alike in sound, appearance and meaning, e.g. ‘invitación’/’invitation’, ‘clase’/’class’, ‘profesor’/’professor’ usually come from their common linguistic ancestor, Latin. However, the similarity has also come from borrowing words from each other e.g. ‘rodeo’, ‘fútbol’/’football’, ‘televisión’/’television’ particularly with the introduction of new inventions and the increase in communication between countries. Yet sometimes words may look similar but be false cognates and have no linguistic link at all e.g. ‘mucho’/’much’.

In terms of orthographical differences between these cognates, there are a few consistent rules which apply to many, some examples include:



•          The Spanish ‘-cion’ is the equivalent of the English ‘-tion’ in words such as ‘diccionario’/’dictionary’ and ‘posición’/’position’.

•          The Spanish ‘inm-‘ is the equivalent of the English ‘im-‘ in words such as ‘inmigrantes’/’immigrants’ and ‘inmoral’/’immoral.

•          The Spanish ‘es-‘ is the equivalent of the English ‘s-‘ before a consonant in words such as ‘España’/’Spain’ and ‘especial’/’special’.

•          The Spanish ‘f’ is often the equivalent of the English ‘ph’ in words such as ‘fotografía’/’photograph’ and ‘frase’/’phrase’



Nevertheless, it is important not to forget that although a word may look and sound the same in both languages, there are often connotations of that word in one language which might not exist in the other language.

As for grammatical differences, the most noticeable is the Spanish employment of gender, a feature absent in the English language. In Spanish all nouns are either masculine or feminine, with which all adjectives, definite and indefinite articles, possessives and verbs have to agree and in many cases the genders of these nouns can be recognised by their endings; masculine words tend to end in ‘-o’, ‘-e’, ‘-r’ etc and feminine words tend to end in ‘-a’, ‘-ión’, ‘-dad’ etc.  Other than plurals, the only exception in English is a unique word which has to agree with the subject or object, the adjective ‘blond(e)’, due to its French roots.

A significant grammatical similarity is word order. With the exception of the position of adjectives (‘una persona inteligente’/’an intelligent person’), most sentences will be parallel in arrangement in both languages, e.g.:



‘Las opiniones que son presentadas por la mayoría de los personas en la historia son controvertidos.’



‘The opinions which are presented by the majority of the people in the story are controversial.’



         The final aspect we must now consider is punctuation: the ‘.’ and ‘,’ we use to separate digits in large numbers in English, e.g. £34,000.50, reverse in Spanish i.e. £34.000,50; phrases which in English end in a question mark, e.g. ‘and you?’, in Spanish begin and end in question marks, i.e. ‘¿y tú?’; and excerpts of dialogue are indicated by speech marks in English, e.g. ‘"Come here," he said’, but are indicated by dashes in Spanish, i.e. ‘–Ven aquí–le dijo’.

         All in all, Spanish and English are, to a certain extent, very similar, in terms of grammar, punctuation, orthography, history and pronounciation, especially compared to languages deriving from non-Latin based roots. However, the number of differences between the two is also very significant, providing us with two individual languages with their own distinct characters and customs.