{"id":633,"date":"2008-03-20T18:05:44","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T17:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/20\/mutual-intelligibility\/"},"modified":"2008-03-20T18:05:44","modified_gmt":"2008-03-20T17:05:44","slug":"mutual-intelligibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=633","title":{"rendered":"Mutual intelligibility of languages"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve ever wondered just how much mutual intelligibility there between different languages, the sites I came across today will go some way to satisfying your curiosity.<\/p>\n

One site is a Wikipedia page<\/a> which discusses the degree of mutual intelligibility between a wide range of languages for quite a few different language families. It divides languages into those that are mutually intelligible in both their written and spoken forms, their spoken forms only, or their written forms only.<\/p>\n

Then there’s a long discussion on this site<\/a> about the mutually intelligibility of Slavic languages. There seems to be many different opinions on this topic.<\/p>\n

I find that with a fairly good knowledge of French and Spanish, plus a basic knowledge of Portuguese and Italian, I can read and sort of understand just about any Romance language, with the exception of Romanian. When I hear unfamiliar Romance languages spoken, I can get a basic idea of their meaning as well.<\/p>\n

My German helps me to understand written Dutch and Afrikaans to some extent, and to understand a bit of their spoken forms. In fact I understand slightly more of them than of German regional dialects such as Bavarian.<\/p>\n

My limited knowledge of Czech and Russian helps me understand bits and pieces of other Slavic languages, at least when they’re written.<\/p>\n

Knowledge of Irish enables me to understand quite a lot of Scottish Gaelic, and some Manx, though as Manx spelling is so different, it takes a lot of decoding.<\/p>\n

I can understand some written Cornish thanks to my Welsh abilities, though hardly any Breton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve ever wondered just how much mutual intelligibility there between different languages, the sites I came across today will go some way to satisfying your curiosity. One site is a Wikipedia page which discusses the degree of mutual intelligibility between a wide range of languages for quite a few different language families. It divides […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}