What is Mutual Intelligibility and Who Has It?
The intelligibility can be asymmetric, such as when Portuguese-speakers have an easier time understanding Spanish than Spanish-speakers have when trying to comprehend Portuguese. This intelligibility can also be symmetrical, when both sets of languages can be understood by the other equally.
Mutually intelligible languages usually are of close geographic origin to the other and display very similar grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. The following are a list of mutually intelligible languages with respect to each other.
The Germanic languages of Afrikaans, Dutch, and Flemish are very similar and its speakers can easily comprehend one another. To a certain extent, people who speak Dutch can understand oral German while Germans find it easier to read Dutch than hear it.
The Scandinavian German languages of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish are very genetically close. The speakers of the triplet languages can understand each other pretty well, but it had been said that Norwegians have an easier time comprehending both Swedish and Danish than can Danes or Swedes understand the three languages.
Many Slavic Eastern Europeans claim that they speak up to 5 languages, that is because of the high level of mutual intelligibility there is between the Slavic languages. Ukrainian and Belarusian are both rooted to the Russian language and both understand Polish far better than Poles understand Ukrainians and Belarusians. Even more, Poles comprehend the Ukrainian language better than Belarusian because they pronounce words more similarly.
Bulgarian and Macedonian are almost identical despite some differences in pronunciation. Their major difference is in the origin of borrowed words: Bulgarians borrow more from the Russian language and Macedonians borrow more from Serbian and English. Many Bulgarians claim that Macedonian is a "knock off" of Bulgarian, created in 1945.
Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Montegrin are mutually intelligible as well, all coming from the western group of the South Slavic languages; often called Serbo-Croatian. Slovak, Polish, and Czech are also genetically close, especially Czech and Slovak (they were Czechoslovakia for almost a century).
Many people already know how easy it is for a Portuguese person is to understand Spanish or Italian, this is because of their roots in the Latin language. Galician, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ladino are mutually intelligible. Romanian and Moldovan are identical to one another and Italian and Romanian are asymmetrical. Romanians understand Italian better than vice versa which might be because of the Romanian language borrowing certain Slavic words from its neighbors.
The extreme corners of Latin intelligibility are Romanian and French.
Certain Indic languages that are mutually intelligible are Seraiki, Punjabi, Urdu, and Hundi. Nepali and Hindi use the same script and have common vocabulary.
Celtic languages that are mutually intelligible are Breton, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic.
In South East Asia, Laotian and Thai are very similar as well as Malay and Indonesian being similar.
The following languages are NOT mutually intelligible with any others: Japanese, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian.
Published by Fabienne Hernandaise
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- The Germanic languages of Afrikaans, Dutch, and Flemish are very similar.
- The Scandinavian German languages of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish are very genetically close.
- The extreme corners of Latin intelligibility are Romanian and French.
6 Comments
Post a CommentJust gonna say, I have some experience with all the Celtic languages you mention. Only partially correct- Breton and Welsh form a pair of semi-mutually intelligible languages, while Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic form another separate pair, even more mutually intelligible. The four of them, however, are not. Otherwise, thanks for the article, just thought I'd mention that.
what about the elimination of languages and mutual intelligibility
The celtic languages are not mututally intelligible.
Irish and Scots Gaelic are to an extent as are Welsh and Breton. The two groups though...not so much.
Finnish and Estonian ARE mutually intelligible with each other. Estonians tend to understand Finnish better than Finns understand Estoinan though.
Flemish is in fact not an official language. The official language is just Dutch. The accent can be different, but the language in (norhern) Belgium and The Netherlands is the same.
Very informative article!!!!