A false friend is a word in a foreign language that’s spelled and pronounced in a similar way to a word in another language but has a totally different meaning. ![]() Cognates are your true friends when it comes to learning a second language.įalse friends, on the other hand, make learning a new language a bit more tricky. They’re not exactly the same, but close enough that an English speaker can easily remember the Italian equivalent. Learning about these two can help improve your Italian vocabulary.Ī cognate is a word that has a similar spelling and the exact same meaning between two languages. These words can be split up into two groups: cognates and false friends. Since the Italian and English languages share roots, there are a lot of words in both languages that share a common Latin root. What Are Italian Cognates and False Friends? That’s why the English language has a large portion of its vocabulary (about 40%) rooted in Latin, and why the sentence structure of English is more similar to the Latin languages than its Germanic counterparts. One of the results was that the English language became Latinized. Remember 1066 and the Battle of Hastings from history class? After this event, England was taken over by William the Conqueror of Normandy, whose people spoke Old French. Still, the languages of the Latin and Germanic branches have similarities by virtue of being Indo-European languages.Įnglish, however, is unique among the Germanic languages. These languages remained independent from the influence of the ancient Romans. Latin was the language of the ancient Romans, and it spread throughout the massive Roman empire which included present-day France, Spain and Italy.Įnglish is part of the Germanic branch of Indo-European languages, together with Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages. Italian is part of the Latin branch of the Indo-European family, together with Spanish, French and Romanian. Today, the majority of the languages spoken in Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Nomadic tribes from Central Asia started moving into Europe around 5,000 BC, spreading their language along the way. In this case, that ancestry is Proto-Indo-European, spoken in Central Asia as early as 7,000 BC. ![]() Think of this language tree as a family tree, stemming from a single language ancestor. Both English and Italian are part of the large Indo-European language family. To understand why English and Italian are so similar, you have to understand a bit about their shared history. (Download) Italian and English Are Natural Language Friends This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬlick here to get a copy.
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