Linguistics Micro Lesson: Cognates, False Friends, and False Cognates

Cognates are words that sound similar in different languages, come from the same source or root word historically somewhere back down the line, and have the same meaning.

They can range from essentially the same word just pronounced with a foreign accent (English idea vs. Spanish idea; the words come from the older Latin and Greek words) to words that have slightly different appearances but still are recognizable if you have knowledge of the phonology (sound systems) of the foreign language, like the English school and the Russian shkola (школа).

You should be aware of false friends, too. These are words in different languages that look or sound similar but in fact do NOT mean the same thing. English’s fabric and Spanish’s fábrica are an example of this; the Spanish word actually means “factory.”

And finally, neither of these is to be confused with false cognates. To make matters more perplexing, false friends are actually often called false cognates, but this is technically incorrect. False cognates differ from cognates in just one way: the words are actually not derived from the same root word historically. So they’re still words that have the same meaning and sound about the same in both languages, except that they’re not historically related. It’s just a coincidence. 

Examples of this are English’s fee with Chinese’s fei, English’s verb to occur and Japanese’s ocoru, and English’s dog with Mbabaram’s (that’s an Australian Aboriginal language) dog. Weird, huh?

Are you confused yet?