Atlas

How close are the sisters, really?

Everyone says Spanish and Italian are close and French went its own way. Here you can check, on the whole word bank: for every pair of languages, how many words are cognates (and how many were inherited on both sides), how many are only distant cognates or not related, how far apart the inherited cognates sound, and how much of each language came down by mouth versus back from books. Filter by topic or level and the numbers follow.