Dutch and Afrikaans is probably in the top three most similar language pairs among Indo-European languages along with Spanish-Portuguese-Italian (a three way) a

Dutch and Afrikaans is probably in the top three most similar language pairs among Indo-European languages along with Spanish-Portuguese-Italian (a three way) and Danish-Norwegian bokmål. The fact that people switch to English is more a reflection of how good English language education is than the difference between the languages. If you are in Italy and you speak Spanish and English you’ll get more benefit from your Spanish outside tourist traps.