Mutual intelligibility
Mutual intelligibility, or English mutual intelligibility, is a characteristic in general linguistics that can be found in a number of language pairs. Mutual understandability is given when speakers of different languages can understand each other without any special prior knowledge. Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used as a criterion when it comes to delimiting languages and dialects . However, there are also sociolinguistic factors that affect mutual intelligibility.
concept
The term was introduced into scientific discourse by the US linguist Leonard Bloomfield in 1926 in order to create a concept based purely on mechanistic language analysis , regardless of historical, political, religious or nationalistic classifications. In contrast to classic categorizations, it can happen that an idiom that is generally regarded as a dialect of a language is less mutually understandable than a related but recognized language form that is recognized as an independent written language. A similar approach based purely on synchronous analyzes is the concept of linguistic distance formulated by Heinz Kloss .
A distinction is made, however, between oral and written mutual intelligibility. The mutual intelligibility of the languages can, however, also be asymmetrical, so that a speaker understands more of what his counterpart is speaking than the other understands. Symmetrical intelligibility is therefore understood to mean equivalent mutual intelligibility. There are often different degrees of mutual intelligibility in related or geographically close languages, often in the context of a dialect continuum .
Examples
Written and oral forms
Some closely related languages, which also use a similar scripting model, are " mutually intelligible " both orally and in writing . This applies to the following examples, among others:
- Croatian , Bosnian , Montenegrin and Serbian (if the latter is only spoken or written in Latin script)
- Bulgarian , Macedonian and Torlak (if the latter is written in Cyrillic )
- Czech and Slovak
- Russian , Belarusian and Ukrainian
- Dutch and Afrikaans
- German (especially Moselle Franconian ) and Luxembourgish
- Danish and Norwegian (especially Bokmål here )
- Icelandic , Faroese and Norwegian (especially Nynorsk )
- Galician and Portuguese
- Galician and Spanish
- Corsican and Italian
- Turkish and Azeri (if the latter is written in Latin script)
- Bahasa Malayu and Bahasa Indonesia
Oral forms
On the other hand, some languages are more or less mutually understandable in their spoken form, while they use different codification models in writing. Examples include:
Written forms
On the other hand, there are languages that are easier to understand in their written form, while communication in their spoken form presents greater problems. Among other things, this applies to:
- Danish , Swedish and Norwegian
- German and Dutch (asymmetrical)
- Spanish and Portuguese (asymmetrical)
- Spanish and Catalan
- Estonian and Finnish
- Persian and Kurdish
- Standard Chinese , Cantonese , Taiwanese , etc. (all Chinese languages )
Signed forms
Asymmetrical shapes
- Portuguese speakers usually understand Spanish better than the other way around, as they use a writing model similar to Spanish, but the Portuguese pronunciation of the same causes problems for Spanish speakers.
- German-speaking Swiss and Austrians usually understand Germans better than the other way round, as they learn standard German in addition to their dialect and, through consuming German media, have at least passive language skills in other German dialects.
- Lithuanians understand Latvians better than the other way round, as the Lithuanian language is more archaic and rich in forms than the Latvian language.
- Research shows that German for Dutch-speaking is to understand better than vice versa. Studies with German and Dutch children aged 9-12 (without knowledge of foreign languages) showed that the German children understood fewer Dutch words than the other way around. When it comes to mutual intelligibility, there are also big differences between related and unrelated words . In a study by the University of Groningen , Dutch speakers were able to translate 71% of German cognates (related words, e.g. "boom" and "Baum") correctly, but only 26.6% of non-cognates (e.g. "vaak "and" often "). In almost all studies on mutual understandability, the German and Dutch standard languages are compared. The mutual intelligibility between Standard German and Dutch dialects (or Standard Dutch and German dialects) is negligible.
Web links
EU projects:
Individual evidence
- ↑ KomInform.at - Language as a political phenomenon ( Memento of the original from July 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ University of Pennsylvania: Linguists' Definition: mutual intelligibility
- ↑ Aldersson, Russell R. and Lisa J. McEntee-Atalianis. 2007. A Lexical Comparison of Icelandic Sign Language and Danish Sign Language. Birkbeck Studies in Applied Linguistics Vol 2. A Lexical Comparison of Icelandic Sign Language and Danish Sign Language
- ^ John B. Jensen: On the Mutual Intelligibility of Spanish and Portuguese , Hispania, 72; 1989 (PDF; 2.6 MB)
- ↑ Gooskens et al., Cross-Border Intelligibility on the Intelligibility of Low German among Speakers of Danish and Dutch .
- ^ Charles Boberg, The Handbook of Dialectology: dialect Intelligibility. John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
- ↑ Vincent J. van Heuven: Mutual intelligibility of Dutch-German cognates by humans and computers . November 12, 2010.
