Spanish and Greek
If you’ve ever heard Greek being spoken, you might have thought that it sounds quite like Spanish. If so, your instincts are correct and you’ve picked up on a phenomenon known as phonological convergence, where two distinct languages become more similar over time. This is something which can appear in countries that are geographically and culturally close, such as Spain and Greece. So how and why have these two languages become more alike over time?
Spanish and Greek stem from the Romance and Hellenic branches respectively of the Indo-European family tree. Despite the separation of these branches taking place some time around 2500 BC, today the two languages sound strangely similar. This could have been due to centuries of cultural and linguistic influence from Latin, but their similarities have only appeared more recently. In other words, Modern Greek and Iberian Spanish find themselves far more similar to each other than Ancient Greek would have been to vulgar Latin.
What are some of the similarities between these languages? The first is their shared vowel system; over time, both Modern Greek and Spanish developed the simple five vowel system we know today which consists of short, clean vowel pronunciation. Secondly, Greek and Spanish share consonant pronunciation, with softened b/d/g’s when in between vowels, and they distinctively share consonant sounds like c/z (th- sound in English) too.
Alongside this, Spanish and Greek both favour open syllables, where words frequently end in a vowel. If a word does end in a consonant, it will most likely be either an n or an s. Finally, both languages have very fast-paced speech rhythms, giving them a staccato and crisp sound rather than the stress-timed rhythm of a language like English.
The question of why this convergence has happened is open to debate but linguists have put forward a few different theories. One is that languages over time tend to simplify and shave down some of the rough edges in their pronunciation, with some of the shared sounds in both Spanish and Greek appearing in each language only in the last five centuries. Geography also plays a role, with Mediterranean trade routes promoting contact between other littoral countries in the region.
These theories though only partly answer the question of why this phonological convergence has taken place, failing to explain why other languages spoken around the Mediterranean are not as similar as Greek and Spanish. Ultimately, languages can evolve in a multitude of ways and it just so happens that both Spanish and Greek have settled on a similar vowel and consonant system to each other, giving them a similar sound to each other today.