eli5 How do languages have the same alphabet (like Spanish and English) but are so different with their words?

Question

eli5 How do languages have the same alphabet (like Spanish and English) but are so different with their words?

In: 2

Answer 1

The spoken word is older than the written word and, up until comparatively recently, most people (or at least a lot) were illiterate. Thus different languages evolved and were purely spoken but little was written down.

Writing then came to a wide, linguistically diverse area (Europe) from one group so all the different people were writing using the same letters but their spoken languages were very different.