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These ranking ignore the fact Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than any other two languages in this top ten listing. Although Spanish and P
by vorg 14y ago
These ranking ignore the fact Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than any other two languages in this top ten listing.
Although Spanish and Portuguese are now two separate unintelligible languages, they were virtually the same 800 years ago. Someone literate in one can easily learn the other; it's probably the same with fluency. Machine translation between them is probably very accurate because of their relative closeness and the huge volume of sample data for both languages. Also... Because of geopolitics, Brazil and the rest of Latin America can easily negotiate compromise agreements where they say "put the administrative center for this in Brazil and make Spanish the official language for it".
So perhaps there's more of a case to consider Spanish and Portuguese to be one language for these rankings, than there is to lump all the unintelligible Arabic dialects (Morrocan, Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, and Gulf) into one language, or the unintelligible Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Minbei, Minnan, Xiang, Gan) into one language.
- pjmlp 14y agoYes, as Portuguese I also have an issue with his bias for Brazilian Portuguese, as there are many more countries speaking the language. - Portugal - Brazil - Angola - Mozambique - Green Cape - Saint Thomas and Prince - Guine-Bissau - East-Timor Probably a few others might still use some dialect of the language as well. Actually Portuguese was the same as Galician not Spanish. Spanish is actually Castilian from Castile region. In 1516 Ferdinand II declared it as the official language of Spain, hence Spanish. But you're right about the language similarities.
- zalew 14y agoI spoke Brazilian Portuguese and even back then it was relatively hard for me to understand Portuguese the original due to pronounciation/accent differences (by relatively hard I mean I had to focus). I had less problems understanding Spanish, say, in Uruguay. To this day, although I forgot the language, I can easily spot a Brazilian in a crowd of talking people while it takes me a moment to recognize someone speaking European Portuguese. > many more countries speaking the language. maybe more, but not with 200 million people
- dguaraglia 14y agoHah, that's something that always amazed me: I lived in Brazil for 7 years (coming from Argentina) and became fluent in Brazilian Portuguese in the process. Funnily enough, I don't have any problem at all understanding most Portuguese people, whereas my wife wouldn't be able to understand half of what they said. How does that work? :)
- pjmlp 14y agoHaving a few Brazilian friends, I would say they have some hard time getting our pronunciation, whereas foreigners seem to be more open minded, kind of. I have lived this experience with French. I have less problems to understand French Canadian than my French friends.
- zalew 14y agoAmerican English is also easier to understand for most foreigners than some accents of English (and I mean only the ones from England).