Comments on: Mutual intelligibility of languages

by: robert berger

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:14:42 +0000

Turkic languages , which are very interesting
and closely realted , are supposed to have a
remarkable degree of mutual intelligibility, despite the vast area over which they are spoken. I met a Turk who once visited Uzbekistan , and was surprised at how well he could understand Uzbek. It seemed like
just a Turksih dialect to him.

by: Pablo

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:54:36 +0000

Mutual intelligibility between related languages has always been a linguistic fascination for me. I speak English and Spanish fluently, and can get by a little in Portuguese, Italian, and to a much lesser extent French. As far as reading, I know that reading a Portuguese paper is almost no problem for me. Writing, I can do OK with help from a dictionary as the lexical similarity between Spanish and Portuguese is 90%..if it’s not a perfect cognate, chances are there is always a matching construction. Speaking and listening..another story. Brazilian Portuguese I understand pretty well, almost completely depending on how fast the Brazilian is speaking. Galician, same thing..I consider that almost like Portuguese with a more Spanishlike pronunciation. BUT..Euro Portuguese..I REALLY need help understanding..I get maybe every 4th or 5th word. As a Spanish bilingual rep for an Rx company, I had many perfectly understandable conversations in a mix of Span and Port. I have done with Italians as well..but while the sound structure and individual word lexicon is similar, the grammar in Italian is much more Frenchlike. Spanish speakers understand the words just fine..until it comes time to form a plural (”dos casas” as opposed to “due case”, for example).

It is also interesting to think, had the French not exerted such an influence on England so many centuries ago, how much English speakers would be able to understand Dutch, Flemish, and Frisian, and even German, Swedish, ect to an extent. Modern English is almost half Germanic, half Romance, due to the conquests of the past.
great blog!

by: Uruwashii

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:52:17 +0000

I speak Malay and therefore I can speak Indonesian. I speak three Sinitic languages (Mandarin, Cantonese and Southern Min/Taiwanese) but none of these are mutually intelligible. Being able to read Chinese characters, I can also read Japanese kanji and Korean hanja although I have no idea how they are pronounced in Japanese or Korean. I speak and read some Swedish so I can also read some Danish and Norwegian.

by: Chris

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:00:29 +0000

The scandinavian languages are fairly close. I speak Norwegian, and can without too much difficulty understand a Swede or Dane. Danish can at times be a little difficult. There’s a great video from a TV show here on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

by: Phil

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:23:10 +0000

I remember reading somewhere that mututal intelligibility is not so much to do with the similarity of the features of different languages but rather how much contact that individuals have with the language.

There is, apparently, a dialect continuum through the Netherlands and into Germany. The dialect speakers in the Netherlands can understand standard dutch. The dutch dialect speakers in Germany can understand standard High German but speakers of these very similar dialects find it difficult to understand each other across the border.

This is not so remarkable considering that for the U.S, ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘Twin Town’ were subtitled.

by: James

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:12:38 +0000

It´s a joke. I used to live there, I am employed in the USA. Most of my friends are from the USA.

Why does one always have to explain this?

by: DL

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:38:23 +0000

@ James

What do you mean by, “I can normally understand American from my English.”?

by: James

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:49:06 +0000

Much of mutual inteligibility is about desire, as I have noticed when I have tried to get friends here to read blog entries in portugues… they don´t like it. I had to translate the silly thing into Spanish for them (and a Brazilian friend gave it the all clear!)

It´s also about the level of the language in question or dialect you speak. If you have a large vocabulary in, say, Spanish, you can understand the other romanance languages much better. “El can” is an archaic or dialect word for dog, so you can guess “chien” or “cane” “cão” or whatever else (like from english “hound” you can guess German “Hund”, Dutch “hond” or Swedish “hund”). If you are looking for “perro” or “dog” you won´t get far.

by: Colin

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:46:26 +0000

Some interesting links there. To add to the testimonials, having grown up in a Spanish-speaking household as a monolingual English speakers, and subsequently studying until I have a fairly high degree of proficiency in Castellano (I do get confused when initially listening to non-Spaniards and Andalucians - it’s the c’s and z’s). With that and a little bit of determination, it’s pretty easy to get accustomed to at least reading a wide range of Romance languages. In fact, I get all my news from Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Asturianu websites. Speaking is something else, though…

by: LandTortoise

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:09:10 +0000

I speak Spanish well as a foreign language and I’m interested in Spanish-Italian mutual intellibility. Recently been to Italy and used Spanish on the unsuspecting natives and, yes, for everyday needs Spanish is understood. Replies are always in Italian for which my comprehenion is around 50% only. Sometimes Italian seems easy to understand other times I haven’t a clue. The News on TV is easy; dramas difficult.