I once read that the language most grammatically similar to English is … Lithuanian. I found that tidbit in a newspaper trivia column in pretty much the form I’ve stated it here, with no further elaboration.
Any linguists here have a comment on this? Any truth to the claim?
I don’t think so, no.
Lithuanian is, like English, an Indo-European language, one much studied by Indo-Europeanists because of its conservative features like the case system. This sometimes gets mangled in the popular press to “the oldest language in Europe” or something equally nonsensical. I can see someone misunderstanding the relationship and glibly glossing it as grammatically similar. But Lithuanian has gender and a strong case system, so I don’t see how the claim as made in the OP could be true.
Speaking from experience of having studied Lithuanian (self-study, over a period of a couple of years) I don’t agree that English and Lithuanian grammar are similar. Lithuanian has all sorts of grammatical features that simply don’t exist in English, such as a well-developed noun case system, an array of participles, and inflection of numerals, pronouns, participles and adjectives. In fact, Lithuanian is in some ways more similar to Finnish than to English, even though Finnish and Lithuanian are unrelated.
In my subjective judgement, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch are all considerably more similar to English, grammatically, than is Lithuanian.
Thanks 
I wonder where the columnist came up with his statement? Probably just repeating somebody else …
I wonder if it was Frisian and the columnist got confused?
Here’s the tree structure for the Indo-European language family. You can see that Lithuanian isn’t anywhere near English:
That would be my vote
It’s <–this close–> to being understandable (especially if you know a little Middle English).
Or perhaps the OP is referring to the claim that Lithuanian is the closest relative to the Indo-European parent language? (I do not know the veracity of this claim, but I’ve seen it many times repeated that Lithuanian is the oldest surviving I-E language, and the closest to whatever proto-Indo-European would be.)
Excuse me–YINGLISH? That’s considered an actual language?
You’d have to be some kind of schnook to believe that.
IANALinguist (yet!), but I would submit Frisian or Scots as the closest language to English, depending on whether you consider Scots its own language or not. I don’t want to step into that debate, except to say that the UK officially considers Scots a language and has officially apologized for the abuses that have stemmed from the assumption that it wasn’t.
Scots doesn’t strike me as waddling or quacking. It seems to me to sound and read like a dialect with a sometimes strong (even incomprehensible) accent and a few more Norse words than they use further south. I think the UK government was pandering. But I’m no expert.
I’m not either, but I found the Bible passage quoted in the Wikipedia article completely incomprehensible. The last time this was debated, my opponent said he could understand it, but he was also familiar with the English translation, which I was not. I’m pretty sure we agreed to disagree in the end.
Has that Bible passage been edited out of the article?
-FrL-
Lithuanian? absolutely not. I speak some Frisian, having lived there, and I’d say that it’s indeed closest to English, more so at any rate than Dutch, which is already pretty close. Some interesting similarities have been pointed out to me. For instance, the plural of skiep (sheep) is skiep - no change, as in English.
There is no absolute boundary between dialects and languages. There is a continuum between them. In many cases it’s hard to tell if two varieties of a language are just dialects or are sufficiently different to be called different languages. Ethnologue tends to be slightly on the side of calling varieties different languages rather than just different dialects of a single language. Ethnologue says that there are 6,912 languages in the world. If, on the other hand, you went slightly to the other side and tended not to call things different languages but rather different dialects when possible, you would probably count several hundred less languages in the world.
But somehow I doubt you’d end up calling Lithuanian and English dialiects of the same language.
No, I wasn’t talking about English and Lithuanian. I was talking about English and Scots, for instance. That’s a case where they are on the boundary between being different languages as opposed to different dialects.
Ah. Well, carry on then.
So, Wendell, what about the Lithuanian - Proto-Indo-European claim? Any truth to that?