I'm a native English speaker (well...the Scottish version) and I have pretty strong French, however the place where I felt the people were speaking the closest thing to English I've heard was in The Netherlands.

Dutch is indeed rather similar to English, especially old English. Especially if you, like me, are more sensitive to grammar than vocab when getting a feel for a language. But English vocab is very Frenchified.

It's true that the 100 or so most important words in English are still Germanic, and also that all European languages imported tens of thousands of rare, fancy, words from Greek, Latin and French. But I am talking about the middle-space, those few thousands of common-but-not-ubiquitous words that fill a student's vocab list.

In most Germanic languages that stuff is still largely Germanic, but in English it is much more mixed.

Scottish is incorrectly labeled on the map. Source: have scottish friends. At least I think they're my friends, hard to tell exactly at times.

Haha. Yeah everyone is a bit bilingual growing up in Scotland.

Supposedly (I don't know for sure) English inherited mostly Germanic grammar/structure-words, and French verbs & nouns.

Seems to be vaguely upheld by Wiki although I can't find my original source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...

Old English was a Germanic language. Grammar-wise was a lot like modern German or Dutch. However, as English evolved, its grammar was greatly simplified, and nowadays only a few vestigial features of the original declension system remain.

But the declension system is not the whole grammar.

So while articles don't change much under declension, words like "a" and "the" are familiar to Germans but not to ancient Romans (I don't know about the French). Also the relative order of adjectives and nouns is Germanic. Conjugations, while simplified, still retain much of the old structure, and the set of tenses understood in English is quite Germanic.

Frisian is a close relative to Eng, but obvs not widely spoken since proper Dutch replaced it completely in schools till recently, where now you can take some classes.