Which is the closer cognate to Italian: French or Spanish?

Actually, contrary to common thought, French is closer. The only reason that people say Spanish, is because of a closer relationship in terms of pronunciation, hence Italian seems to be closer to Spanish because of a relatively similar audio to the average ear.

However, when you go one step further into the actual written language and examen what the words look like and how they are spelled and examen their roots, a different relationship is revealed between them, as lexical similairty between French and Italian is 89%, while Italian and Spanish have a lexical similairty of only 82%.

I can attest to this personally, as being familiar with all three languages, I have noticed that there are numerous French words that have a commom root with the Italian equivalent, whereas the Spanish equivalent is completely different.

A few common examples:

FR - Manger

IT - Mangiare

SP - Comer

EN - to Eat

FR - Parler

IT - Parlare

SP - Hablar

EN - to Speak

FR - Jour

IT - Giorno

SP - Día

EN - Day

Not to say that there aren't any Spanish words that share a common root with the Italian equivalent with the French equivalent being completely different, but there are just significantly less instances of this.

Italian Cognates

Yes Spanish is closer to Italian than French although the differences are very great.I know the Romans who spoke Latin conquered Spain and left a lot of Latin influence there.Much later the Moors left a lot of Arabic.So Spanish developed from Latin and Arabic.Of course the Romans conquered France as well but the Moors did not.Also it was much easier to go to Spain by ship than to go over the mountains from France.

People who are saying Spanish have no idea what they are talking about.

French is closer. Spanish takes many words from Arabic and other influences, while Italian and French are both above 80%, maybe 90% Latin-based, so they are far closer to each other than Spanish is to either of them.

French just has a kind of complex orthography (writing system, it's a bit messed up like English's is) and their pronunciation is different because of Norman influence, but the roots and meanings of words are much easier to understand if you want to learn Italian.

Well, italian and spanish are interchangeable as languages.

I'm italian and in Spain I felt free to speak in my language cause spanish people, even if with a little initial difficulty, understood what I was saying.

The same happens for italians with spanish, I listen spanish songs sometimes and I can understand much of the text, even if I've never studied that language in my life.

So I would say spanish.

Spanish

As an italian, I find spanish much easier to understand it than french - having studied neither of them

I heard once that Spanish is actually closer to Italian than Spanish is to French, so I would imagine that the opposite is also true.

Spanish.

Spanish.