Then, some Italian people from the South of the country even say that, speaking in their local dialect (or language), they can understand better Catalans and Spaniards. But also because the grammatical similarity. It's French! Why? Because of the Lexical Similarity. So, if is Spanish the answer to the question What is the nearest Romance Language to Italian?, we have to reject that. A very typical word I remember that stays the same in the two languages is "tipo", a word of everyday use also in English, where is translated as "like". But it was also interesting the fact I didn't understand anything when they talked to me in their native ones. Personally speaking from my Erasmus experience, I noticed that Portuguese speakers understand very easily when an Italian speaks in his/her native language. In the end, I don't believe that Portuguese and Italian don't have any words in common. It is quite difficult to understand the written language and the oral one with speakers of these languages. This fact becomes more interesting when talking about Catalan: in fact, this language has more words in common with Italian, than its "cousin" Spanish. And it is amazing that Italian has even similarities with the English verb "to win" and the translated German one "gewinnen" (in Italian "vincere"), but it doesn't with the Spanish one "ganar". And some of them are in the lexicon: the Spanish word "salida" ("exit") is a false friend in Italian. The percentage is high, but there are a lot of differences between the two languages. And Spanish? The percentage with Italian arrives at 82%. Here, the issue is not about the written language (intelligibility higher), but about the oral one: hard thinking that Catalans and Italians will easily and fast understand each other in a normal conversation. But is it always like this? If we try to look at Catalan, the lower percentage stops at 85%. The written language is even easier: no problems in both groups of speakers. In fact, French people and Italian people can easily understand each other when speaking. The first language we look at is French with its 89% of lexical similarity and mutual intelligibility. The starting point of the research was a range of pair of words, which could create the chart of the lexical similarities. We will try to analyze the data and get a critical vision of them. The collected data in this topic come from the Ethnologue, an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian are similar in a certain way. Today I focused my attention upon the Lexical Similarity and the Mutual Intelligibility between Italian Language and the Romance Languages that belong to its family. Since I ran into an article about Language Distance, I was interested in this topic.
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