🇩🇪 → 🇮🇸

How easy is Icelandic for German speakers?

Going from German to Icelandic (Íslenska) has a composite linguistic distance of 36% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

36% distance FSI Cat III — ~1,100 hours

Lexical similarity

45%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance

92%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity

11%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match

100%

Latin → Latin

Genealogical kinship

70%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

Open the interactive comparison →

Other easy languages for German speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from German:

🇱🇺

Luxembourgish

9% distance
🇳🇱

Dutch

22% distance
🇮🇱

Yiddish

26% distance
🇿🇦

Afrikaans

32% distance
🇬🇧

English

34% distance

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between German and Icelandic. No signup.