Is The Spanish Language Really Related To Italian?

[Baburra]

I recently had a conversation online with an Italian acquaintance, and we were talking about the Spanish language. She mentioned that Spanish is actually related to Italian, which honestly surprised me at first, but as I thought about it some more, a few of the words are actually similar such as "verde", and even the whole word and sentence structure began to look similar to me, especially for food names. Anyone here who is more knowledgeable with history care to shed some light as to how this came about?

[beneditco]

Hi! I'm Spanish and I understant Italian almost perfectly. I can have a normal conversation with people with no problem (I speak Spanish and they Italian).

You're right, Italian and Spanish are very similar. The biggest difference is the pronunciation but the rest is almost the same

[MyDigitalpoint]

Spanish and Italian are very similar, but Portuguese also has many similar words and can be easily understand it by Spanish speaking people and vice versa, though Italia is best understood.

Reason is that these languages share a same Latin root, which also comprises the French language despite this has none resemblance with any of the above.

[jodig]

Hi there! Modern Italian is obviously the direct descendant of Latin. Now, the Roman Empire started colonizing the Iberian Peninsula at about 218 b.c (if I am correct). This "version" of Latin is called "vulgar latin" and is the language that served as a basis for many indo - european languages.

I am Spanish Philology undergraduate, so there's my source! If you want more details, feel free to ask!

[thekernel]

Spanish and Italian are very similar, but Portuguese also has many similar words and can be easily understand it by Spanish speaking people and vice versa, though Italia is best understood.

Reason is that these languages share a same Latin root, which also comprises the French language despite this has none resemblance with any of the above.

I wouldn't go that far. Though French is very intricate compared to Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, there are tons of word roots that overlap. For example, "Pessimistic" is "Pesimista" in Spanish and "Pessimiste" in French. Or "Iron", which is "Fierro" in Spanish and "Fer" in French. Many other similarities between the romance languages exist because of their shared roots.

[Androu1]

Yeah, pretty much as others have said. They have shared roots and are both romance languages, so there's a fair lot of similarities. One has to be extremely wary of False Friends when dealing with such similar languages...

[rgaz83]

Not only do they share a Latin root, but Spain also occupied part of Italy for a time. This led to some back-sharing of vocabulary words, especially in that area, making the languages even more similar. They're not completely the same, but they're quite close.

[Efrahinu19]

Well they are both romance languages, so in a way yes they are related. Yet both come from Latin which is the base or core of all romance languages. The history is very fascinating, If fact I just might learn Latin after I get a couple other languages out the way.

[petesede]

It is easy to know how close languages are.  Imagine if you start in Rome and you take a trip to Span, then Portugal, then up to France, then England, then Germany and Russia.  That is basically the pathway of the modern languages.  The further along you get on your trip, the more likely the native country was to have already invented words and grammar of their own.

[SpringBreeze]

They are actually related. They are both part of the Romance languages / Latin languages group. They both developed from Latin. French, Romanian and Portuguese are in the Romance language group too.

One time studied Italian and Spanish at the same time, and omg, was that an ordeal. On tests, I'd mix the two up because they were so similar.

[czarina84]

On ‎10‎/‎27‎/‎2013‎ ‎6‎:‎18‎:‎02‎, MyDigitalpoint said:

Spanish and Italian are very similar, but Portuguese also has many similar words and can be easily understand it by Spanish speaking people and vice versa, though Italia is best understood.

 

Reason is that these languages share a same Latin root, which also comprises the French language despite this has none resemblance with any of the above.

I don't know about that.  I agree that Italian and Spanish have more in common, but I have been able to figure out some Italian because of words that I knew it both Spanish and French.  Granted, I completely agree that French is a bit removed from the others, but some simple words, like, no, non, et cetera, are pronounced the same way, even though they are spelled differently.  I wonder how French ended up so different when it is also a Romance language.  However, look at English.  It's a Germanic language and pretty different from Eastern European languages.

[petesede]

Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are probably the 3 closest languages that are considered different languages.   If you know one, you will just spend most of your time learning the slight differences between them rather than like learning a new language.

It is more like learning spanish if you speak english and you using a word like ´terrible´.

[Mary84]

I'm a native italian speaker and I'm learning spanish. Both languages have the same derivation (latin) but in spite of that they are different in several aspects. While I agree that they are rather similar in structure and if you know one of them learning the other will be easier,  they remain two separate languages, each of them with its set of grammar rules, accents, punctuation, pronunciation. Most of the words are very similar in both languages but you must be careful, some words might look similar but they have different meanings. "Diario" for example means diary in italian and newspaper in spanish. It's rather easy to make a mistake if you are not careful enough.

[lingvo]

Both italian and Spanish are romance languages, just like Portuguese and French. These languages have lots of similar words and grammar rules, also they share a fondness for convoluted verb conjugations xD. And yes, Italian and spanish are very related since these two share  regular vowel pronountiation as a very convenient feature.

[aviendha]

I have heard the comparison that French, Spanish and Italian are more like second cousins than close relatives...they go back to the same family tree, and will have  quite a bit in common, but still have their own individual family life. 

I took French in college and while I fell out of practice in it, many of the grammatical rules do transfer over quite nicely. I am thankful for that as it is getting tougher to learn new languages the older I get. 

[OddVisions]

I believe the Spanish and Italian languages are closely related because they both share an originating language. They are considered to be two of the Romance languages. That is to say that the language they originated from was a form of early latin. Because of this, these two (and three other) languages share many similar words and meanings. 

[Tripeo]

I'm a native Spanish speaker myself and I don't really consider that Spanish is somehow related to Italian in any way, however, there are several words and phrases that sound the same, I don't really think that it could be considered as an interrelationship between both languages, but yes, sometimes you'll confuse it with Spanish, mostly if you're learning. Portuguese is the language that's closer to Spanish, that definitely is related to Spanish in many ways.