In Linguistics , is a property exhibited by a set of Language s when speakers of any one of them can readily understand all the others without intentional study or extraordinary effort. It is sometimes used as one criterion for distinguishing languages from Dialect s, though Sociolinguistic factors are also important.
Intelligibility between languages can be asymmetric, with speakers of one understanding more of the other than speakers of the other understand of the first. It is when it is relatively symmetric that it is characterized as 'mutual'. It exists in differing degrees among many related or geographically proximate languages of the world, often in the context of a Dialect Continuum .
For individuals to achieve moderate proficiency or understanding in a language (called L2) other than their Mother Tongue or First Language (L1) typically requires considerable time and effort through study and/or Practical Application . However, for those many groups of languages displaying mutual intelligibility, namely, those, usually Genetically Related languages, similar to each other in Grammar , Vocabulary , Pronunciation , or other features, speakers of one language usually find it relatively easy to achieve some degree of understanding in the related language(s). Languages mutually intelligible but not genetically related may be Creoles and parent languages, or geographically adjacent variants of two unrelated languages.
However, intelligibility among languages can vary between individuals or groups within a language population, according to their knowledge of various registers and vocabulary in their own language, their interest in or familiarity with other cultures, Psycho - Cognitive traits, and other factors.
According to some definitions, two or more languages that demonstrate a sufficiently high degree of mutual intelligibility should properly not be considered two distinct languages but, in fact, multiple Variants of the same language. Conversely, it is sometimes the case that different varieties of what is considered the same language—according to popular belief, governmental stance, or historical convention—are ''not'', in fact, mutually intelligible in practice. (For more on this, see Dialect , and Dialect Continuum —as well as Diasystem and Diglossia for two closely related but distinct language forms.)
- Germanic
- --- Afrikaans , Dutch , Flemish , Low German , and the most western forms of Low Saxon .
- --- Yiddish (Latin Alphabet Only), German
- ---To an extent, Dutch speakers can understand most spoken sentences in German whereas Germans find it easier to read Dutch than to hear it spoken as German is a more clearly enunciated language.
- --- There is also intelligibility between nearby dialects of German , Low Saxon , Limburgish , Luxembourgish all rooted largely in vocabulary cognate with German vocabulary (see West Germanic Dialect Continuum ).
- --- Danish , Norwegian , and Swedish . The three are considered to compose the ''Mainland Scandinavian'' group. Written Danish and the Bokmål form of Norwegian are particularly close, though the phonology and prosody of all three languages differ somewhat. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand any of the other languages. (see Scandinavian Languages and Differences Between Norwegian Bokmål And Standard Danish .)
- --- English and Lowland Scots
- Slavic
- --- Belarusian and Ukrainian both have the same roots in the Ruthenian Language ; both also have many similarities to Polish . Ukrainians and Belarusians understand Polish much better than most Polish speakers understand Ukrainians and Belarusian, and Poles generally understand Ukrainian more than Belarusian because of more similar Pronunciation
- --- Belarusian and Russian - similar pronunciation
- --- Bulgarian and Macedonian - the southeastern group of the South Slavic branch. They have very similar grammars (which vastly differ from all other Slavic literary language grammars), similar lexics and slightly different pronunciations. Their major lexical difference consists of Loanword s, borrowed mainly from Russian in Bulgaria and from Serbian and English in Macedonia. The majority of the Bulgarian linguists assert that the Macedonian literary language, created in 1945, is one of the three norms of the Bulgarian language. This point of view is supported by the Bulgarian public opinion, but is rejected by the Macedonian linguists and politicians. In accordance with these positions in diplomatic relations Bulgarian side prefers not to use interpreters, but Macedonian side insists on their necessity. (Bulgarians also understand the spoken form of the other Slavic languages to some degree, but they are not mutually intelligible.)
- --- Croatian , Bosnian , Montenegrin and Serbian (also previously classified as one language, Serbo-Croatian ) in the western group of the South Slavic branch.
- --- Croatian , Serbian and dialects of Slovak - similar lexics, mutually intelligible.
- --- Torlakian Dialect , spoken in Southern and Eastern Serbia , South-Western Romania , Northern Republic Of Macedonia and North-Western Bulgaria is mutually inteligible within these four regions and shares similarities with all of the corresponding Slavic languages in these countries. Torlakian is not standardized, and its subdialects significantly vary in some features.
- --- Czech , Slovak , Polish , and the Sorbian Languages are ethnically close - all of them of the West Slavic branch. Especially the former two used to show a great degree of mutual intelligibility until the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Nowadays, with a new generation growing up, the intelligibility is getting asymmetric with Slovaks understanding Czech easier than vice versa. This is due to asymmetric cultural exposure with many books, DVD's, and other products in Czech language being sold on the smaller Slovak market too rather than getting their own costly Slovak localization. However, now and again one can still see Slovak spoken on Czech television (mostly news reporters) without the need for dubbing or subtitling.
- Romance
- --- Spanish , Ladino , Portuguese , and Galician have a high degree of mutual intelligibility, although speakers of Portuguese seem to understand Spanish, Ladino and Galician more easily than the vice versa situation.
- --- Catalan and Occitan .
- ---Standard Italian and Corsican (sometimes considered part of the Tuscan Dialect ).
- --- Romanian , Aromanian , Megleno-Romanian , and Moldovan (the latter is considered identical or nearly identical to Romanian).
- --- system of classical Latin to a limited degree, while Italian did not. Also, Romanian has many Slavic words that Italian lacks, but has also kept the Latin words as doublets.
- --- Spanish , Portuguese , French and Italian speakers also share a certain degree of mutual intelligibility in written language.
- Indo-Iranian
- --- Sanskrit and Avestan
- --- Punjabi , Seraiki , Hindko and Pahari-Pothohari/Mirpuri . Pothohari speakers seem to understand Punjabi easier than vice versa.
- --- Hindustani with Hindi if Devanāgarī is used.
- --- Hindustani with Urdu if Arabic Script is used.
- --- Nepali and Hindi use the same script, Devanāgarī , and a common vocabulary of Sanskrit -derived words. Exposure to Indian media is enough for most of the Nepalese people to learn Hindi
- --- Persian , Dari and Tajik , besides being orally mutual intelligible, the writings are mutually intelligible only if Perso-Arabic Script is used, as Tajik is the only one that also uses Cyrillic .
- Celtic
- --- Irish and Scottish Gaelic are very similar
- Malay and Indonesian (linguistically two slightly different variants of the same language, distinguished for political-cultural reasons). See also '' Differences Between Malay And Indonesian ''
- There is a degree of mutual intelligibility among some of the Polynesian languages. For example, when James Cook visited New Zealand in the late 18th century, he was able to communicate with Māori people through a Tahitian chief named Tupaea who was travelling with him. Generally, Tupaea and the Māori were able to understand each other fairly well, but on some occasions even Tupaea was baffled.
- Tamil and Malayalam (These languages belong to the subgroup of Southern Dravidian. The only other major Dravidian language is Telugu , but it comes under Central Dravidian subgroup and is heavily Sanskritized . Please note that though Malayalam is also heavily sanskritized (mostly in formal vocabulary and excluding grammatical words such as pronouns, although it has also been influenced by aspects of Sanskrit grammar such as Sandhi rules), it retains many Dravidian roots, especially in colloquial forms. Even though Telugu is largely unintelligible to speakers of South Dravidian languages, some relationship is still obvious - for example, "Rama kicked {Link without Title} ball" would be "rāmudu bantini koṭṭaḍu" in Telugu, whereas in Malayalam it would be "rāman pantine koṭṭi" (the verbs in the phrase are there because they are cognate with each other, beginning with "koṭṭ-" in both cases, but koṭṭi has developed a slightly different connotation in Malayalam and "taṭṭi" would normally be used instead). Tamil and Malayalam Speakers are often able to understand each other and converse in their native languages to each other with little problem of intelligibility. Written language seems to be mutually intelligible for the most part as well.
- Bantu
- --- Zulu , Xhosa , Swati , and Northern Ndebele ( Nguni Languages )
- --- Bukusu and Masaaba
- --- Tswana , Pedi and Sotho
- --- Nyoro and Tooro
- --- Beti , Bulu , Ewondo and Fang (Beti languages)
- --- Kwanyama , Ndonga , and Kwambi ( Oshiwambo Group )
- Mande
- --- Bamanankan Or Bambara , Jula Or Dyula , Mandinka Or Mandingo , Maninka Or Malinké , and others ( Manding Languages )
Manglish and Singlish .
- Interlingua (constructed language), Catalan, Occitan, standard Italian, Spanish, Ladino, Portuguese, Corsican and Galician (all Romance) are mutually intelligible to some degree.
- Written Chinese can be read to some degree by Koreans familiar with Hanja , the old style of Korean writing using Chinese characters.
- Written Chinese can usually be read to a limited degree by those proficient in Japanese ; the reverse can be true to a lesser extent although the wide use of phonetical characters ( Kana ) in Written Japanese hinder this.
- Germanic
- ---Those proficient in Icelandic can read Old Norse with little difficulty, about as easily as Shakespeare for modern English speakers. {Link without Title}
- ---To a substantial degree, Dutch with both German and Middle English .
- Celtic
- --- Scottish Gaelic and Irish , sister variants of the Goidelic Celtic branch, see the Differences Between Scottish Gaelic And Irish
- --- Cornish , Breton , and some southern Welsh dialects, sister languages of the Brythonic Celtic branch
- Romance
- ---Though their degrees of mutual intelligibility vary in spoken form, Portuguese , Spanish , Italian , Catalan and Interlingua are highly mutually intelligible in written form. Romanian is more difficult for other Romance speakers but still readable to some extent, especially if Franco-Italian words are used rather than Slavic words.
- ---Native Portuguese speakers usually read Spanish seamlessly, with the help of a Dictionary for less common words or words derived from archaic (for Portuguese) root forms.
- ---Most written Romance languages are moderately intelligible to English speakers, due to there being thousands of Romance words in the English language. In fact, it is generally easier for English speakers to read Romance languages than other Germanic Languages , except for very simple sentences.
- Slavic Languages written in Cyrillic Alphabet are intelligible to a medium degree. It affects relation between East Slavic Languages ( Russian , Belarusian , Ukrainian and Rusyn ) and South Slavic Languages ( Serbian , Bosnian , Macedonian and Bulgarian ).
- Educated speakers of Modern Greek can read Classical Greek with little difficulty, though even natural speakers of Greek will have much more difficulties reading Classical Greek if they didn't attend a Greek school or were otherwise educated in the language. (For instance, children of Greek parents living in a foreign country) This is mainly due to the great changes in vocabulary: Someone who was raised in Greece will easily understand the Classical Greek word "oikos", meaning "house", unlike a Greek native speaker who was raised in another country, because the Modern Greek word for "house" is "spiti".
- Modern Hebrew speakers can generally read Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew with little difficulty.
- Modern Hebrew and Arabic are historically related and share many grammatical roots, forms and items of vocabulary, but are not mutually intelligible. On the other hand, Hebrew speakers can often understand a good deal of basic Arabic if transliterated into the Hebrew script.
- Many Germanic Languages , though related, are generally not mutually intelligible.
- ---The Frisian Language is the closest living cousin to English (after Scots ), both being descended from the Anglo-Frisian group, but the two languages are not mutually intelligible. Frisian is mutually intelligible with Dutch to a certain extent.
- ---Due to geographical isolation and extensive French and Latin vocabulary, English is not mutually intelligible with any other Germanic language (unless Scots is considered a language rather than a dialect of English).
- ---Swedish-, Norwegian-, and Danish-speakers have difficulty understanding Icelandic .
- --- Faroese -speakers too have difficulties understanding Icelandic and vice versa, despite the similarities in grammar and vocabulary. (The phonetical difference are big though)
- --- Old English is not mutually intelligible with Modern English. It is actually closer in many respects to German, but Old English is still about as far from German as Russian is from Polish. Middle English is intelligible to Modern English speakers in its written form, but not its spoken form.
- Romance Languages :
- --- French is not mutually intelligible with Italian , Spanish , Portuguese or Romanian .
- --- Romanian is typically not mutually intelligible with Spanish, Portuguese or French, though Romanian speakers seem to understand these spoken languages to a certain degree.
- Latvian and Lithuanian , the two biggest surviving Baltic Languages , are not mutually intelligible, despite having similar grammar.
- Standard Greek is generally not mutually intelligible with Greek Dialects , who developed in isolated communities such as Griko and Pontic Greek .
- Slavic Languages are related and to various degrees mutually intelligible. Asymmetrical mutual intelligibility exists between Bulgarian and Macedonian on one hand and the other Slavic languages on the other. This is because Bulgarian and Macedonian have distinctly different grammar. Bulgarian speakers understand other Slavs easier than the other way round.
- --- Russian and Polish are largely not mutually intelligible although Ukrainian is mutually intelligible to some degree to both, being believed by many to be an intermediary form in the Dialect Continuum .
- Many spoken languages and dialects of Chinese are not mutually intelligible, such as Mandarin , Cantonese , and Shanghainese .
- Oral Modern Mandarin is not mutually intelligible with oral Ancient Mandarin due to the changes of pronunciation of some words, plus the change of the grammar and usage.
- Oral Ancient Mandarin of different dynasties of China are not mutually intelligible, especially those which are several centuries apart, because of the changes of pronunciation
- In addition, various groups of Min dialects (or languages), for example Min Nan and Min Dong , are not mutually intelligible.
- Malay and Indonesian are not mutually intelligible with Tagalog or Cebuano .
- Most languages of the Philippines such as, Tagalog , Cebuano , Hiligaynon , Bikolano and Ilokano are not mutually intelligible with each other, dispite the fact they are more closely related compared to other Austronesian Languages , such as Malay and Indonesian .
- Hungarian and Finnish or Estonian are not mutually intelligible to any extent.
- Many Arabic dialects are not mutually intelligible with each other. For example, North African dialects are difficult for Near Eastern Arabs to understand. For this reason, Classical Arabic is the lingua franca of the Arab world.
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