Dear Duolingo: Why do some unrelated languages seem similar

Dear Duolingo: Why do some unrelated languages seem similar?

Distant cousins? Borrowed words? Your brain playing tricks? Yup, all of that.

Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for learners. Catch up on past installments here.

Hi, there! We're back this week with a question that you might have considered yourself-especially if you've studied multiple languages. Let's dig in!

Our question this week:

This is a smart observation-and Double Take included so many wonderful examples in their email. I won't be able to address them all, but here are some of the many reasons why unrelated languages might look or sound similar!

1. The languages are actually distantly related.

You can think of languages as being part of linguistic family trees: They can be more closely related (like siblings or first cousins), more distantly related (like second or third cousins), or they could have no relation at all.

And just like human relatives, closely related languages will share some things in common… and a language might have sounds, words, or grammar in common with a more distant relative, too!

For example, English is a Germanic language and is "genetically" most closely related to languages like Dutch, German, and Swedish. But all those Germanic languages are part of a larger family tree of Indo-European languages, and so English also inherited some things that its more distant cousins-like Russian, Greek, Farsi, and Sanskrit-inherited from a previous ancestor, too.

2. The languages have a history of contact.

In other cases, languages might sound or seem similar because of language contact: Some situation caused the communities to interact, learn each other's languages, and (intentionally or not) carry some words or patterns from the other language to their own.

It's easy to imagine how words can be borrowed in this way. In a very simple example, people from one language group come to a new place with some amazing dish from home, and their word for it gets picked up by the locals of the new place.

This same kind of borrowing can happen with other parts of language, too. Phrases, grammar, and even pronunciations can be borrowed or developed together through contact between unrelated languages. Even pronouns can be borrowed: English got they and them from a Scandinavian language, probably when those speakers invaded modern-day England.

3. The languages share a common pattern.

Today's email from Double Take included some interesting commonalities between languages that are unrelated and wouldn't have had much historical contact. How does that happen?

Another reason for unexpected similarities is that there are some common patterns found across the world's languages. For example, among spoken languages, all languages have syllables that can be made up of a consonant followed by a vowel-for example, me, two, and saw are all syllables (and words!) that are pronounced with a single consonant and a single vowel. As a result, many languages only have these kinds of syllables, or nearly all their syllables are like this. That could make them sound similar, especially in their rhythms, even if they're unrelated.

(English is a language that uses other kinds of syllables, too, like syllables that start with multiple consonants, like grow, and syllables with multiple consonants at the end, like sixths… but these aren't allowed in many languages!)

Besides sounding rhythmically similar, two unrelated languages might also use certain kinds of sounds that make them sound similar. If the languages both have a lot of sounds made in the same part of the mouth, especially if those sounds are relatively uncommon across the world's languages, the languages could sound similar. If they both happen to have sounds made with less common ways of making sounds-like click sounds-this could cause them to seem similar, too.

4. The languages are similar through pure coincidence.

There are over 7,000 languages spoken today, and there have been many times more than that used throughout human history! That means sometimes there will be similarities between two languages due to chance.

5. They're not as similar as you think.

Sometimes, what sounds or seems similar to us is a trick of our brain. When we learn languages, especially as infants and small children, that language literally rewires our brain-and it impacts how we hear languages for the rest of our lives.

So when we hear a new language, one we don't understand or aren't very familiar with, we are channeling that new language through the one(s) we already know. Our brain is trained to listen to the sounds in our own language, so what sounds "similar" to us is actually the result of what our brain pays attention to-and could be totally different from what speakers of other languages, or the "similar" languages themselves perceive as "similar."

There are other factors that influence how you hear sounds and accents, too, so beware of linguistic illusions created by your brain!

Listen closely!

There are many interesting historical and linguistic stories bubbling under a language's surface, if you know how to listen!

For more answers to your questions about language patterns, get in touch with us by emailing dearduolingo@duolingo.com.