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What languages are extremely similar to each other? Not only related or some words, but very similar that people in both language understand each other for the most part.
Romanian and Moldovan. (Moldova in fact before WW2 was a part of Romania).
I think Urdu (of Pakistan) and Hindi (of India) are very similar (collective they are called Hindustani). However, they are written with different alphabets which reflects the religious/ nationalistic divide. Until 1947, Pakistan was a part of India.
Moldovan and Romanian are i fact the same language, but with some different words. (Russian influence on Moldovan)
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, French. But in varying ways.
French and Italian are very lexically similar, thus you can easily read one if you know the other, but spoken? It's a whole different story. French, phonologically, differs greatly from the other Romance languages. In some ways though, the sound of Portuguese resembles French.
Spanish and Portuguese are lexically similar, almost identical even, but some varieties of Portuguese (Brazilian, mostly) are more mutually intelligible with Spanish than European Portuguese is. On the other hand, Italian and Romanian are in many ways more phonologically similar to Spanish, even if the lexicon differs sometimes.
Romanian sounds like Italian and Spanish most, but lexically has Slavic loanwords the others don't have.
French is actually quite different from Italian and Spanish but it bears a lot of resemblance with Catalan. for example: bonnes festes - bonnes fêtes
Italian and Spanish are very similar in many ways, these are the languages closest to the vulgar Latin spoken in the Middle Ages.
(for example prossimo- proximo, pagar- pagare)
Romanian is different in many aspects. It's similar to some small Romance languages spoken in Eastern Europe. Also culturally very different from spain-Italy.
Very similar languages (mostly mutually understandable) are Belarussian-Ukrainian, Ukrainian-Russian, Bulgarian-Macedonian, Turkish-Azerbaidjani, Portuguese-Galician, Kyrgyz-Kasakh, Arab-Assyrian.
Arabic and Hebrew, but people speaking those languages won't admit it.
Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic are semitic language related to each other.
However, those who speak the languages don't understand each other at all, except some words being the same. I speak Aramaic and some Arabic, so I know it. They don't admit it isn't because Jews and Muslims (Palestians) hate each other.
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