the closest language to english that is still used today is frisian, spoken by about 500,000 people living in the netherlands, germany and denmark. it is much like english, and many words are the same. the two languages were even closer before old english changed to middle english). today, speakers of the two languages would not be able to understand each other. dutch is spoken by over 20 million people, and is more distant from english. german is even bigger, and even more distant. all these languages belong to the same west germanic family as english.