Both descended from Latin and both have varying degrees of Germanic and Arabic influence. How easily would a Spaniard, or Spanish speaking Latin American be able to understand an Italian? Could a Madrid resident easily follow a citizen of Milan…what about a denizen of Buenos Aires and a native of Bologna?
(Yes I am aware there are many varieties of both languages).
A friend of mine was from Argentina (which has a significant Italian immigrant population), and she said that Italian speakers sounded like they had atrocious accents. So probably mostly intelligible, but with effort.
I learned Spanish in school; I consider myself proficient but not fluent. I was able to ask for directions and simple things like that in Italy using Spanish, but there were a few times a word I used was not a cognate and I had to search for another way of phrasing it.
We had a Spanish exchange student, and I asked him this very question. He said he could listen to Italian and pick out enough words to get the gist of what was being said, at least most of the time. More than a typical Spaniard would get from English or German, or even French languages. He said he and Italians could communicate on a basic level if they both spoke slowly.
FWIW I asked a question like that to a car-hire driver in Sicily. He spoke very good English and it was interesting to converse with him. I asked him about Italian about Spanish vs Italian and he said that while he could fairly well understand what they were trying to say, but that he could not hold an actual conversation.
I new a guy from Italy and a guy from Peru who worked to together at a pizza shop. They could understand each other for most things, I heard them drop into English occasionally to clear something up. When they started arguing everything fell apart, I’m sure the language broke down into slang and idioms at that point which were mutually unintelligible. Sounded cool though.
I’m fluent in Spanish but not bilingual. I can’t understand Italian aside from a few words. I do much better with Portuguese, being able to get the gist of news reports on TV but not follow a rapid conversation between native speakers. A native speaker of Spanish would probably do better.
For many Spanish speakers, Argentinian falls into the category of “Is this even Spanish?” ;)(Panamanian is in the same category.)So it might be easier for them than the average Spanish speaker.
This is like the second-hand anecdote told to me where this guy is in Italy and needs to talk to somebody, and he does not know Italian well enough to speak it but does have a working knowledge of Latin. So he speaks Latin (with some unspecified accent) while the interlocutor responds in Italian, and they somehow manage to hold a conversation, the Italian assuming the guy was speaking some kind of thick redneck dialect. Goes the story.
Our Spanish teacher in high school (1970’s) also spoke French, and mentioned that as a result he could understand well spoken Italian (like News announcers). If the word doesn’t sound similar to Spanish, it likely matches the French.
OTOH, I assume French and Spanish, like English, have their varied accents. I needed the subtitles to understand half the stuff in the movie version of “Billy Elliot” for example.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. You seem to be fluent in English. If you’re also fluent in Spanish, aren’t you by definition bilingual? Does bilinguality have a high bar to you than just fluency?
Personally, I regard being bilingual as speaking both languages with equal fluency. I am much more fluent in my native language, English, than in Spanish. I can easily hold a conversation but I make more grammatical mistakes than I would in English. I know lots of people who learned both languages when they were young and have essentially native fluency in both.
As a native English speaker, it is easier for me to understand different English accents than it is to understand different Spanish ones.
One more anecdote: the wife of one of my best friends is Italian-German (her parents came from Sicily to Germany over 40 years ago), and she once told me that she can hold basic conversations with her Spanish acquaintances in their respective native languages.
Apparently in cases where Spanish and Italian speakers (with no fluency in the other language) are in a situation where they have to communicate for an extended period, they spontaneously develop a sort of intermediate pidgin language that has come to be known as Itagnolo
But are all Itagnolos the same? That is, if I lock one group of Spaniards and Italians in one room, and lock a different group of Spaniards and Italians in another room, will they end up making the same compromises? I suspect not, but it’d be quite interesting if they do.
If it’s not always the same, though, then that’s not much different from any pair of languages. Put speakers of any two languages together, and they’ll come up with a pidgin and eventually a creole.
It’s easier for us (Argentinian spanish speakers) to understand Italian than English, or even French, but harder that Portuguese I think, I would rate their intelligibility llike this:
)In fact, the largest ethnic ancestry of Argentinians is Italian. One thing that may help you to remember this is the most famous Argentinian of Italian ancestry at the moment. It’s Pope Francis.
I hope Frodo will forgive me for repeating this, but it’s a joke Argentinians tell on themselves: An Argentinian is an Italian who speaks Spanish, acts like he’s French, and wishes he were British.
The mutual understanding becomes much better under the influence of wine, lots of wine. After a short time, you become family.
I just had to add this to the discussion. Polish was my mother’s first language. And she was telling me, one time she saw a foreign movie in Russian. She told me, although she technically didn’t speak Russian, she understood quite a bit of the movie. Maybe three quarters. I also read somewhere (sorry, I forget where), that some Scandinavian languages are mutually intelligible. Depends on where you travel, I seem to recall. I think Dutch and South African Dutch are basically the same language. But the culture is different, so it’s partly a matter of pride, it would seem.
I don’t think Spanish and Italian are very similar though. I don’t speak from experience, of course. I know German and English are in the same family group. But can you understand German? Ironically, I think most English speakers would better understand Spanish.
German and English are akin, but the versions of German that are closest to English are already pretty far from the language of Chancellor Merkel, and those English-like German languages were then mixed in with a very large dose of French.