1. Genetic Relationship:
* Closest: Languages that share a recent common ancestor.
* Examples: Spanish and Portuguese (Romance languages)
* Note: This doesn't necessarily mean they are always easy to understand! There can be significant differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, even within a single language family.
2. Mutual Intelligibility:
* Closest: Languages where speakers can understand each other with some effort.
* Examples: Swedish and Norwegian, Dutch and German
* Note: Intelligibility can be very subjective, depending on individual speakers' exposure and proficiency.
3. Lexical Similarity:
* Closest: Languages that share a high percentage of cognates (words with a common origin).
* Examples: English and German (both Germanic languages)
* Note: Lexical similarity can be influenced by borrowing, so it's not always a perfect indicator of close relationships.
4. Typological Similarity:
* Closest: Languages that share similar grammatical structures and features.
* Examples: Japanese and Korean (both agglutinative languages)
* Note: Typological similarities can occur across language families, suggesting convergent evolution of language features.
To give you a more specific answer, I need more context. What are you interested in knowing?
For example, are you curious about:
* The closest languages to English?
* The closest languages to a specific language family?
* Languages that are most mutually intelligible?
Once you provide more information, I can give you a more precise answer.