Tell Similar Languages Apart

This page should help you to tell similar languages apart, even if you do no speak these languages.

Contents:

• If you know some of these (or other) languages, please try to explain thier difference, come up with sentence-examples or straight up grammar rules that make the distinction between languages easier decipherable for those of us not speaking those languages.

Scandinavian Languages

How do I tell if something is Norwegian, Danish, or Swedish?

This is pretty much a touch and go case, but take for example the sentence: "Until night becomes day"

Danish:	Tills natt bliver dag
Norwegian:	Til natt blir dag
Swedish:	Tills natt blivit dag

Table of Pronouns and Articles

English (for comparison)	Danish	Norwegian	Swedish
I		jeg	jag
you		du	du
he, she, it		han, hun, den/det	han, hon, den/det
we		vi	vi
you (plural)		dere	ni
they		de/dem	de/dom
them			dem
and		og	och
a		en/ei/et	en
the		-en/-a/-et	-en/-et
not		ikke	inte

Note that scandinavian languages don't have a special word for "the", instead the noun in question gets modified by adding letters at the end. Example: dog, the dog (eng) -> hund, hunden (swe/nor)

Furthermore it is worth noting that the Norwegians and Danes write with the vowels æ ø å, but the Swedes use ä ö å.

East Asian Languages

How do I tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, vietnamese and Indonesian?

Telling the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Korean isn't difficult if you know what to look for.

Chinese

Chinese is written entirely in Chinese characters (also known as han characters or hanzi in Chinese). These are the most complex fullwidth characters. If there's no hiragana, katakana or hangul used, it's highly likely that it's Chinese.

Japanese

Japanese also uses Chinese characters (known as kanji in Japanese), but hiragana and katakana are also used. Both hiragana and katakana only have 46 basic characters each, so you're more likely to see the same characters used more than once.

Korean

Korean now uses very few Chinese characters (none at all in North Korea) and it would be quite rare to find Korean CDs with Chinese characters. Instead, Korean uses hangul. Although the number of actual characters is rather high like with Chinese characters, hangul syllables are made up of letters in a way which is rather like playing Tetris with your letters. For example, ㅅ (s) and ㅏ (a) give 사 (sa) and adding ㅇ (ng) gives 상 (sang). (Can people see these OK? --Nikki)

The characters for the word "of" are usually rather common, they are 的, の and 의 in Chinese, Japanese and Korean respectively.

This bit could do with some example sentences, but the only sentence I can do in all three is "My cat is black"... --Nikki

• hmm. it would be neat if you added that sentence tough ;) ~mo

Vietnamese and Indonesian

Both languages are written with the latin alphabet. Vietnamese normally has a ton of accents, Indonesian tends to have longer words (and no accents).

Latin Languages

How do I tell if something is Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan or Romanian?

French uses pronouns a lot more than Spanish. Below is a table with pronouns in latin languages. If you speak a latin language that is not in the table, please add it.

French can have a cedilla on the c (ç), an accute accent on e (é), a grave accent on a, e and u (à, è, ù) or a diaeresis or circumflex on any vowel (ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, â, ê, î, ô, û). Also, no verbs that I can think of end in -o (like the Spanish 1st person singular present tense).

Apart from grammar, distinguishing Italian could be quite simple: almost all (in fact all) words end with a vowel (a e i o u or à è ì ò ù). Words in other latin language often end differently.

Table of Pronouns and Articles

English (for comparison)	French	Spanish
I	je, me, moi, m'	yo
you	tu, te, toi, t'	tu
he, she, it	il, elle, se, s', lui	ello, ella
we	nous, on	nos(otros)
you (plural)	vous	vos(otros)
they	ils, elles	ellos, ellas
and	et	y
the	le, la, les, l'	el, la
a	un, une	un, una
not	ne ... pas, n'... pas	no

Note that Spanish was added by DonRedman who does not speak Spanish natively. DeleteWhenCooked

Germanic Languages

How do I tell if something is German (German, Austrian, and Swiss), or Dutch?

Dutch is spoken in The Netherlands and the northern part of Belgium. It can be distinguished by the use of the words 'de' (de vrouw), 'het' (het huis) and 'een' (een persoon), meaning 'the' (the woman), 'the' (the house) and 'a' (a person) (or 'one' (one person)). It's not unusual for words to have more than 2 vowels in a row. e.g. 's Nachts na tweeën. Also the letter combination 'ij' is a tip for the text being dutch. More hints at CapitalizationStandardDutch.

Table of Pronouns and Articles

English (for comparison)	German	Dutch
I	ich	ik
you	du	jij, je, u
he, she, it	er, sie, es	hij, zij, het
we	wir	wij
you (plural)	ihr	jullie, u
they	sie	zij
and	und	en
the	der, die, das	de, het
a	ein, eine	een
not	nicht	niet

How do I tell Germanic languages from Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish...)? see Scandinavian Languages

Slavic Languages

How do I tell if something is Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian...?

Sorry, noone entered any help here, yet.

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discussion: 

I propose we add the words 'love' 'to love' (they are different in alot of languages) and more times to the pronouns, I/me you/? we/us them/they ? he.she.it/him.her.it? and maybe owning pronouns too, (hers, his, our, mine etc) ~mo

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