The idea of a "Romance Language" is something that many people have heard of, but not too many know exactly what it means. Although it tends to lend itself towards people considering these languages to be "romantic" in nature (not completely unfounded I guess, given Italian and French fall under this categorization), it actually has a different origin. They actually were named so because they are a group of languages that can all be traced back to Latin, which can then be traced back to the Romans (Although I will admit, the accents and languages can still definitely be considered romantic.)
As you probably could have guessed, Spanish and French are both Romance Languages. Other relatively popular Romance Languages include Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Romanian, and Catalan. Learning at least one Romance Languages is actually incredibly useful! In fact, almost one billion people worldwide speak at least one of them, with Spanish being the most popular with almost 500 million native speakers. As I mentioned before, all of these languages branched off of Latin. Therefore, there are a ton of similarities between each of them!
There was actually a very interesting study done into this, called “On the Romance Languages Mutual Intelligibility.” It took into account word etymology (the study of the origin of words and their meanings), cognates (words in different languages with the same/similar ancestors), and measurements of the similarities and dissimilarities of words based on factors such as spelling, usage, and meaning, in order to measure the mutual intelligibility between different Romance Languages. What they found was actually really cool!
Spanish and Portuguese are ~ 89% mutually intelligible
Italian and French are ~ 89% mutually intelligible
Italian and Spanish are ~ 82% mutually intelligible
Spanish and French are ~ 75% mutually intelligible
French and Portuguese are ~75% mutually intelligible
To put that in context, let's compare that with a non-Romance language. English, for example, is widely considered to not be significantly mutually intelligible with anything. Let's take a word that everyone knows pretty well: love.
English: Love
French: Amour
Spanish: Amor
Italian: Amore
Romanian: Amor
Portuguese: Amor
I mean, one of these is definitely pretty different from the others. If that didn't convince you, let me try another pretty common word: sweet.
English: Sweet
French: Doux/Douce
Spanish: Dulce
Italian: Dolce
Romanian: Dulce
Portuguese: Doce
English is so different from the others, even though it's also widely considered to be a universal language. However, this also goes to show that if you know one of the romance languages pretty well, you can probably at least understand some basic speaking/writing from the other Romance Languages—especially ones that are very closely related. Below is a chart (that I stole from Wikipedia) that maps out the Romance Language origins. The closer together two languages are on that chart, the easier that they would be to understand and learn if you already know one of them.
I actually started thinking about this because there's a really cool class that Hopkins offers called "Fast Portuguese for Spanish Speakers and Speakers of Other Romance Languages." It's a fast-paced one-semester course that covers Introductory Portuguese I and Portuguese II, and meets for 150 minutes a week instead of the typical 250 minutes for an introductory language class. As you may have guessed, I'm planning on taking it next semester, and I think it's a really cool idea to incorporate a language you already know into learning a new one. It offers a whole new perspective to learning a new language. Although I've never spoken or learned Portuguese before, I have been taking Spanish classes for about seven years now (And I've binged a lot more Spanish TV shows than I'd like to admit. I watched all of the three-season series Elite on Netflix in like a week during quarantine; I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested!). So even though I technically am a beginner in Portuguese, I don't think it's actually going to feel like it.
We live in a world where it's definitely beneficial to be bilingual. About 66% of children worldwide are brought up bilingual. Studies have found that people who speak more than one language tend to have incomes about 1.5-3.8% higher, they regularly score about 100 points higher on the SAT than their monolingual peers, and numerous studies have found that being multilingual is linked with higher cognitive abilities, greater brain function and ability to understand new concepts, and better social skills.
Therefore, if you learn one Romance Languages (like Spanish or French, both of which we teach! Shameless plug to check out our Facebook or send us a message if you're interested in joining Sharing Languages), you're unknowingly on the path to learn even more! Imagine all the traveling you'd be able to do without a translator or a tour guide! Also, to be honest, I think it's pretty cool to be able to tell people that you're trilingual or quadrilingual. Learn one, learn them all!
- Sadhana