Spanish and French, are they even similar? At least they are two of the most popular languages in global terms with the former being spoken in places like Spain, Mexico and Argentina, while the latter has official status in countries such as France, Canada and Belgium.
In addition to being two of the world’s most widely spoken languages, Spanish and French have shared origins and are categorized as Romance languages.
Moreover, they are two of the three most popular second languages taught in schools throughout Europe and in the US, meaning people are mostly faced with a choice between the two.
However, the similarities between French and Spanish do not end there. Here are some of them.
Origins
One of the most essential similarities between Spanish and French revolved around the origins of the two languages. Indeed, both languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, also at times known as colloquial Latin, which was the type of Latin spoken by the lower classes of the Roman Empire, including merchants and soldiers.
As the Roman Empire ended, several variations of Latin started to emerge and these variants became bounded to local areas. Both French and Spanish emerged as distinctive languages between the 6th and 9th centuries and the two languages were spread to other parts of the world primarily through French, Belgian and Spanish colonialism.
The alphabet
While it might feel like an obvious point to some, one of the important similarities between Spanish and French is the fact that both of them use the same basic 26 letters from the Latin alphabet. This is a crucial similarity, because it means the two languages share the same basic writing system, which makes writing simple to pick up.
Even though the letters within the alphabet are used to create different words and sounds, the transition from writing in Spanish to writing in French, and vice versa, is far easier than with several other languages. For example, a French speaker learning Mandarin or Arabic will need to learn a completely new writing system.
Use of accent marks
Another one is the written forms of both Spanish and French include accent marks over particular letters, which denote alterations to stress. Even though this is more commonly linked with French, which has a total of 5 different accent marks, two of these accent marks also appear in Spanish – the acute accent and the diaeresis.
The acute accent is visible in Spanish words such as “sí” and “está”, as well as French words like “éducation” and “université”. On the other side the diaeresis appears in Spanish words such as “pingüino” and “vergüenza”, and also, in French words like “naïve” and “maïs”.