Overall, but particularly in terms of their people, culture, history and outlook. Put another way, which country’s citizens could most effortlessly pass as citizens from another country, and vice versa?
For the purposes of this discussion let’s leave out the micro-states, since it’s no surprise that (for example) people from San Marino could pretty easily be mistaken for Italians.
Please explain what you mean by “effortlessly pass” a little more.
And which cultural aspect carries more weight such as, language, dialects, religion, dress, and race?
There are always going to be subtle clues to determine where someone is from depending on how long one spends talking to a person.
Off the cuff, here goes a few:
Canada & US
UK & Ireland
Norway, Sweden, & Finland
Belarus & Russia
Poland & Ukraine
Denmark & Germany
The more I think of this, the more I think you need to explain this exercise a better.
Too much depends on the knowledge of the examiner, and if the person being examined is trying to be deceptive by adjusting their dialect and other obvious markers.
The shorter the history, the more similar. Latvia and Lithuania often get mixed up, but they have at least somewhat different languages.
I vote for Australia and New Zealand.
Montenegro and Serbia.
Actually, probably most of the states of the former Yugoslavia.
Excluding countries that were part of the same country at any point after 1900:
Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia
Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador
Argentina and Uruguay
The more I think of this, the more I think you need to explain this exercise better.
Too much depends on the knowledge of the examiner, and if the person being examined is trying to be deceptive by adjusting their dialect and other obvious markers.
Anyone could pass themselves off as a naturalized immigrant of another country.
I would be pretty good at picking out which particular country people from Asia are from because I’ve spent a lot of time in that part of the world and can identify some of the languages.
But someone who spent their whole life in Arkansas would probably have a tough time determining a Thai from a Laotian.
What I mean by “effortlessly pass” is, well…just that: for example, when Anglophone Canadians are in the US there is very little to distinguish most of them from other Americans. If you were talking to one at a bus stop and you could probably talk for a long time before realizing that you’re speaking to someone from a foreign country. The accent is mostly the same, the dress is the same, a lot of cultural references would be the same, etc. That’s not true of Denmark and Germany (different languages), though it may be true of Germany and Austria, for example.
I’m not talking about people who are trying to deceive one another or fake an accent, but more which countries/peoples are just naturally the most similar. The judgment could encompass a lot of things. The two Koreas are extremely similar in terms of ethnicity and language, but their vastly different historical experiences the past 60 years or so have made them quite different indeed.
Thai and Laotians may be indistinguishable to someone who’s never encountered many of either, but they’re clearly very different from one another - a Thai person could not easily live in Laos and be mistaken for a native-born local, for example - so that wouldn’t count for this example.
At a minimum the countries need to speak the same language for what I’m asking.
Does that clarify things a bit?
As a side note, I once made the mistake of asking an Irishman what part of the UK he was from.
He really gave me the business for making such a blunder.
He said, “I’m from Ireland! What part of Canada are you from?”
“I’m not from Canada,” I replied.
“Ah, Don’t like it much, Do you?”
He was a friendly guy, but he didn’t let me off the hook very easily.
Did you not like it much? I don’t think it would bother me in the least!
It didn’t bother me at all, but this older Irish gentleman wasn’t too keen on being mistaken for being from the UK.
Would Burma and Myanmar count?
You’ve never been to Latin America, have you?
Those countries are very, very different from each other. Maybe Guatemala and Honduras the most different.
Even Ronald Reagan noticed the difference when he came back from his first Latin American tour, and told a press conference his great diplomatic discovery, “Those are all different countries down there”. He was surprised to see that it wasn’t Mexicans all they way down to Tierra del Fuego.
I agree with you on most of those, jtur88, except Argentina and Uruguay. If there weren’t a river between them one would be hard pressed to know when they had crossed the border.
English speaking Canadians and people from the US immediately come to mind. You might even be able to extend this to Francophones - perhaps a Quebecois could pass as a Louisiana Cajun in many countries.
Australians and New Zealanders. I still can’t distinguish the accents, although I am now good enough that I rarely confuse an Australian accent with a London accent anymore.
And Canada, like the US, has more than one accent. The stereotypical Canadian accent on US TV shows like South Park is more of a Maritime Provinces accent, sorey aboot that, eh. They don’t say “aboot” in Toronto.
My vote goes to Malays and Indonesians, they share genes, language, culture, religion. They are not identical but there is enormous overlap.
I lived in Ecuador for two years. During that time, I met plenty of Colombians and Peruvians, and obviously thousands of Ecuadorians. Similar ethnic mix, similar Spanish (as opposed to, say, the way they talk in Caribbean Spanish-speaking countries), similar music, a lot of similar foods. I can go into a Peruvian restaurant here in SLC, for example, and recognize most of the foods on the menu.
I grew up in the DC area, and learned my Spanish from the Salvadoreans and Hondurans there as I worked in foodservice as a teenager. They always insisted El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were totally different from each other, of course. And I suppose if you were actually from one of those countries, and were looking at small differences on a more granular level than would an outsider, they probably are. But in the grand sweep of things, I thought they were a pretty similar trio of countries.
The Quebecois and Cajun dialects may be similar enough (I don’t know), but the style and culture of the people otherwise seems pretty distant, no? I suspect a Montrealer - or even someone from rural Quebec - would not seem quite like a local down in the bayou.
Perhaps, but such a difference might not be easily recognized in, say, Japan, Pakistan, or Belarus where there isn’t a lot of cross-cultural contact.
To this western Canadian’s ears, they sort of do. It’s a bit of a diminishing “oot” wave the further west you go in Canada, with an increasing drawl as you cross the prairies until you hit the mountains. Maritimer accents have a fairly unmistakable twang to them, and Newfoundlanders are halfway to an Irish accent.