Why English and Spanish share so many words
Una conversación importante. You can probably recognise much of that phrase before studying its individual words. English and Spanish share vocabulary through a long history of borrowing and common ancestry.
English is a Germanic language; Spanish is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Both belong to the wider Indo-European family. English is not a Romance language because of borrowing, but borrowing is part of why a Spanish newspaper can contain so many familiar-looking words.
French and Latin in English
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English speakers took in substantial new vocabulary from French. They also took words from Latin, both directly and through French. This was a continuing process. It was not a single change that followed one battle. Old English already contained Latin borrowings, and English speakers continued to borrow long after the medieval period.
The historical linguist and Oxford English Dictionary editor Philip Durkin traces these different routes in Borrowed Words. A word’s history can involve several languages, changes in meaning and more than one period of borrowing.
From that history English has pairs such as freedom and liberty, or begin and commence. The second word in each pair may look more familiar to a Spanish learner who knows libertad and comenzar. The everyday English translation is not always the closest-looking relative.
A family resemblance you can use
In these pairs you can see some useful patterns:
| English | Spanish |
|---|---|
| conversation | conversación |
| important | importante |
| possible | posible |
| natural | natural |
| curious | curioso |
| university | universidad |
There are further examples in technical vocabulary: biología, teléfono and democracia resemble their English equivalents. Speakers of both languages have drawn on Greek and Latin roots to name ideas, institutions and inventions.
From the resemblance you get a possible meaning to check against the sentence. In La información es importante, you can understand the whole statement from the two long words.
The patterns are useful clues, but you cannot build Spanish words from them. The Spanish for translation is traducción, and you cannot get there by swapping letters.
Related words can develop different meanings
Words with a shared origin do not always have a shared modern meaning. Spanish actual normally means current or present-day. Una noticia actual is a current news item. To say that a story is true, you need different wording.
Other pairs overlap in some uses but not others. Asistir can mean attend, as in asistir a una reunión. It can also mean assist or care for someone. If you learn only one English equivalent, you can be confused when you come across the other.
There are more examples of these differences in our guide to Spanish false friends.
Recognition is a useful first step
If you see conversación and understand it, you have a start. To produce it, you also need to know its spelling, pronunciation and use: Tuvimos una conversación larga.
When a familiar-looking word matters to you, listen to it and practise using it in a phrase. Notice its article and any accent mark. Spanish hospital shares its spelling with English, but has a silent h and stress on the final syllable.
With the vocabulary overlap, parts of Spanish are more accessible. You still have useful work to do: learning the common words that look unfamiliar, understanding the grammar around them and recalling the right expression when you need it.