When people ask which languages I speak, they tend to be impressed and I tend to feel embarrassed because I feel like I cheated. I’m writing down the explanation that I tend to offer – and I get to highlight Minna Sundberg’s glorious language family tree.

My Germanic language journey started with English, expanded to Dutch when I moved to the Netherlands and studied German in school,. It grew further when I moved to Sweden. Norwegian came easily when I met my partner. I even picked up on Afrikaans through a South African friend – it’s remarkably similar to Dutch due to colonization. And to be clear: I’m fluent in English and Dutch, intermediate in Swedish, understand Norwegian but respond in Swedish, and German comes back with exposure. I can order coffee in French and Spanish and say thank you in Cantonese.

In a weird twist, I don’t understand spoken Danish, though I can read it to a certain degree. The words blur together and I don’t know where they end.. I’ve heard Scandinavians say that the Muppets’ Swedish Chef sounds more Danish than anything else..

There’s also the fact that while I seem to have collected languages, I’ve collected related languages. To help make this point, I share Minna Sundberg’s language family tree. Created for her webcomic Stand Still, Stay Silent, it maps Indo-European and Uralic languages as a tree, with leaf size showing speaker numbers.

Sundberg’s tree explains why this works: all these languages branch from the same Germanic root. Each new language I learned made the next one easier, as they share patterns in vocabulary and grammar. She designed the illustration to show why her comic’s characters could understand each other across languages, but it also perfectly captures my own linguistic experience. Interestingly, cats meow differently between the Nordic languages.

This tree is amazing and I am considering having the poster version printed for my wall. I can study it for hours. If you’d like to know more, My Modern Met has further background on the creation process.

Featured image credit: Minna Sundberg