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Mutual intelligibility

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In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a property exhibited by a set of languages 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 dialects, 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.

Intelligibility

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.

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.

Mutually intelligible languages or variants of one language?

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.)

List of mutually intelligible languages

Written and spoken forms

Indo-European

  • Slavic: Most Slavic languages have some degree of mutual intelligibility.
    • 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 loanwords, 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 (may be considered as one language, Serbo-Croatian) in the western group of the South Slavic branch.
    • Croatian, Serbian and dialects of Slovenian - 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 intelligible 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.
    • Slovenian and Kajkavian dialect of Croatian.
    • Czech, Slovak, Kashubian, Polish, and the Sorbian languages are ethnically close - all of them of the West Slavic branch. The first two in particular show a great degree of mutual intelligibility. However, Czech and Polish speakers find it difficult to understand each other.
  • Romance: These language have a high degree of mutual intelligibility[citation needed]. The extremes are French and Romanian.
    • Spanish (Castilian), Ladino, Portuguese, and Galician have a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Galician is much closer to Portuguese than Castilian is. Speakers of Portuguese seem to understand Spanish, Ladino and Galician more easily than vice versa. Spanish and Catalan have a high degree of mutual intelligibility.
    • 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).
    • Romanian and Italian show a limited degree of asymmetrical mutual intelligibility: speakers of Romanian seem to understand Italian more easily than vice versa. This may be due, in part, to the fact that Romanian has preserved the noun case 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.
    • Jèrriais, Dgèrnésiais and Sercquiais speakers have no major problems understanding modern French, however Francophones can only mutual intelligibility read the other way around.
  • Celtic
    • Irish and Scottish Gaelic used to form a dialect continuum, but as some dialects have died out and the two modern standard languages have developed in distinct ways they are not mutually intellegible for the average speaker. The orthographies of the written languages also differ to a significant degree.
    • Breton and Welsh are, against popular opinion, not mutually intellegible. Cornish strongly resembles Breton in orthography.

Semitic

Austronesian

  • 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.
  • Tagalog, Ilokano, Cebuano, Waray, Hiligaynon, Kapampangan and Pangasinense, etc. Even though these are all dialects of the Philippines, when spoken between members of different groups, mutual intelligibility ranges from a small to a high degree depending on the language group. (Tagalog is an exception because it is the second tongue of majority of Filipinos, though many elders and illiterates from that region cannot understand it). For example, if you let an Ilokano converse with a Cebuano, there is a high chance that they will not understand each other because they belong to different subgroups.
  • Filipino dialects and Malay. In this case, the situation varies, as Ilokano, Kapampangan and other surrounding dialects are much closer to Malay than Tagalog in some respects; for example, Ilokano and Malay words are related in terms of spelling and pronunciation, but Kapampangan is closer in sentence structure. However, Malay is not mutually intelligible with Tagalog at all.

Sino-Tibetan

Tai-Kadai

Turkic

Most Turkic language speakers belong to one of two groups, Oghuz and Kypchak. Languages belonging to the same group are mutually intelligible. Other languages, like Tatar and Bashkir, Uzbek and Uygur on the other side are mutually intelligible while sharing common features with both groups.

Finno-Ugric

Niger-Congo

Afro-Asiatic

English Creole

Constructed languages

Across language families

  • Interlingua (constructed language), Catalan, Occitan, standard Italian, Spanish, Ladino, Portuguese, Corsican and Galician (all Romance) are mutually intelligible to some degree.

Spoken form only

Indo-European

  • Indo-Iranian
  • Slavic languages - most neighboring languages are mutually intelligible
    • Belarusian and Ukrainian with Polish
    • Serbo-Croatian, Croatian, Bosnian or Serbian (which are sometimes all considered the same language) show a limited degree of asymmetrical mutual intelligibility with Polish: speakers of these languages seem to understand Polish more easily than the other way round.[citation needed]
    • It is said that Slovak is the most easily understood by other Slavs of all Slavic languages, due to its central location and grammar. [2]
  • Germanic
  • Romance

Dravidian

  • Tamil and colloquial Malayalam mutually intelligible to a reasonable degree, though the formal or literary Malayalam is heavily Sanskritized and has little mutual intelligibility with Tamil.

Turkic

Semitic

  • Modern Hebrew and Aramaic speakers can usually learn the other's language with minimum difficulty, and those who speak it can understand each other with moderate difficulty.

Written form only

Semitic

Sino-Tibetan

Across language families

  • Written Chinese can be read to some degree by Koreans familiar with hanja, the 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 phonetic characters (kana) in written Japanese hinder this.

Indo-European

  • Germanic
    • Those proficient in Icelandic can read Old Norse with little difficulty, about as easily as Shakespeare for modern English speakers. [3]
    • Icelandic and Faroese. Icelanders can read Faroese without much difficulty.
    • Those proficient in Swedish, Norwegian or Danish can understand at least simpler things in written Dutch
  • Celtic
  • 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. [citation needed]
  • 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,[dubious – discuss] 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".

Afro-Asiatic

Sign languages

Indo-European

  • Many Germanic languages, though related, are generally not mutually intelligible.
    • The Frisian languages are the closest living indisputably separate languages to English (though Scots and English , descendants of Old English, are of course even closer to each other), both being descended from the Anglo-Frisian group. The two languages are not mutually intelligible, but there is some evidence that Northumbrian and Frisian sailors could partly understand each other until recent times. West 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, especially in speech.
    • Faroese-speakers too have difficulties understanding Icelandic and vice versa, despite the similarities in grammar and vocabulary. (The phonetic differences are big though)
    • Old English is mostly unintelligible to speakers of Modern English, due in part to the loss of inflection in Middle English and to the highly variable spelling which is often quite different from Modern English, not to mention three extra letters in the alphabet not present in Modern English. However, George Saintsbury, assistant translator of Oxen in the Sun, is known for his belief that "any intelligent person ought to be able to read and understand Old English without recourse to dictionaries or other handbooks." [4].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 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 dialects that 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 their grammar and basic words (pronouns, common nouns, etc.) are very close, more complex words are often quite different, so that one language sounds to a speaker of the other about as intelligible as Jabberwocky does to an English speaker. Ukrainian is mutually intelligible to some degree to both, being believed by many to be an intermediary form in the dialect continuum.

Other language groups

List of selected mutually intelligible languages now extinct

See also

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