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How easy is Swahili for English speakers?

Going from English to Swahili (Kiswahili) has a composite linguistic distance of 69% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

69% distance FSI Cat II β€” ~900 hours
Lexical similarity
10%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
70%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
0%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
100%

Latin β†’ Latin

Genealogical kinship
0%

Indo-European ↔ Niger-Congo

Open the interactive comparison β†’

Other easy languages for English speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from English:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between English and Swahili. No signup.