English and French are only distantly related. There are cognates, but they're hard to recognize: hound - chien, foot - pied, four - quatre. Words you might

English and French are only distantly related. There are cognates, but they're hard to recognize: hound - chien, foot - pied, four - quatre. Words you might be thinking are cognates - such as restaurant, police, etc. - are actually loan words. Some are recent, others go back to the Norman Conquest. English is closely related to these languages (in order of closeness): Scots; Frisian; Dutch and German; Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic.