Germanic language mutual intelligibility best, country. They include the galloromance and iberianromance branches as well as northern italian. These mutually intelligible languages will make you do a double take. Mutual intelligibility in slavic language learning languages. Finnish swedish there are lexical borrowings of swedish into finnish, but they are from different language families, and i dont think mutually intelligible at all. You can also affect the analysis by only considering specific combinations of languages. Hufeisen and marx, 2014 than to teach both language groups to use a third language as a. Mutual intelligibility between west and south slavic languages article pdf available in russian linguistics 393 november 2015 with 1,010 reads how we measure reads. To make the design manageable, we limited our investigation to the three major language families in the eu member states, i. Anecdotally, as a speaker of english and french, i understand about as much spanish as i do frisiansay 5080% as well as the languages in which im fluent.
The degree to which a speaker of one variety understands the speech of another closely related variety can be expressed in a single number closely related languages. The multidimensional mutual intelligibility would have a central role in passing a vision of languages as separate entities, and would enhance the linguistic, metalinguistic, strategic in their mother tongue and other languages known to use them in learning new languages more easily. David dalby, 19992000, the linguasphere register of the worlds languages and speech communities. Mutual intelligibility of closely related languages within. Native speakers of spanish, portuguese, romanian, french and italian participated in three different tests, all of them. Measuring crosslinguistic intelligibility in the germanic. On the romance languages mutual intelligibility pdf. It is commonly believed that all slavic languages are fully mutually intelligible, which implies that they are close. Romance languages mutual intelligibility a language. Venezuelans watch brazilian telenovelas and news all the time and.
Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in europe pdf. Mutual intelligibility wikipedia republished wiki 2. Romance languages mutual intelligibility post by jon. In my talk i will present the results of a largescale webbased investigation of the mutual intelligibility of closely related languages within the. Mutual intelligibility of languages in the slavic family. The romance languages are a group of languages within the indoeuropean language family which share a common origin in the now extinct latin language. Request pdf mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in europe by means of a largescale webbased investigation, we. There are over 800 million people in the world who speak at least one romance language. Contactinduced changes in an immigrant language 111 voigt, stefanie university of groningen.
But then the devils advocate tell you that you would get a lot for free precisely because of that similarity so in the name of saint wanderlust you ought to learn occitan, galician, sardinian, aromanian and at least three varieties of romantsch. Mutual intelligibility between spanish and french or romanian is even lower lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71%. We propose a method for computing the similarity of natural languages and for clustering them based on their lexical similarity. French les langues romanes comme le francais, litalien, lespagnol, le portugais et le roumain sont toutes des langues qui viennent du latin vulgaire, parle par les romains il y a 2000 ans. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated europeans from the same 16 countries where the test languages are spoken. Rather, ethnologue classifications are based on iso 6393, whose classifications are based on three criteria. Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages intelligibility. These mutually intelligible languages will make you do a. Pdf mutual intelligibility among the romance languages robert. Romance languages were written down and taught a lot earlier.
Romance languages mutual intelligibility post by mck74. Romance languages mutual intelligibilty antimoon forum. Between sources, you might find some claiming that two languages are mutually intelligible, while other sources claim those same languages arent. Pdf mutual intelligibility of languages in the slavic. Its been suggested that i am an amateur linguist that is, i am not a real linguist. Mutual intelligibility of closely related languages within the romance language family 1 wahlstrom, max university of helsinki. The effect of the church and latin provided an anchor and a lingua franca between countries for hundreds of years. The romance advantage the significance of the romance languages as a pathway to multilingualism article pdf available in theory and practice in language studies 810. Pdf testing mutual intelligibility between closely related.
Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages. University of groningen mutual intelligibility in the. We will also explore the possible explanations for the asymmetry in understanding. There are conflicting reports about the mutual intelligibility of turkic languages, but still, they differ much less among each other than say,the germanic or romance languages. Pdf this paper describes a new methodology for testing. There was a question on quantifying mutual intelligibility a while ago, in which i pointed to blairs lexical similarity quantification as one way of assessing mutual. Measuring crosslinguistic intelligibility in the germanic, romance. Introduction and related work determining degrees of similarity between the worlds languages is an intensely debated issue lebart and rajman, 2000, many of the controversies in historical and com. On the romance languages mutual intelligibility lrec conferences. As for the other romance languages i am best at spanish but i have taken. On the plus side thanks for clarifying the dialect differences a bit for our non spanish speaking friends. In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelligibility is a situation in which two or more speakers of a language or of closely related languages can understand each other. Some forums can only be seen by registered members.
Romance languages, etymology, cognates, string similarity 1. This thread includes some discussion about mutual intelligibility within southern slavonic languages and other similarities likely brought on from areal influence. This thesis explores mutual intelligibility in the slavic language area how to measure it, how to predict it and how to increase it. Mutual intelligibility between west and south slavic languages. The present paper reports on the results of a comprehen sive project on cross language intelligibility between closely re lated languages within the germanic, slavic and romance language.
There are different ways to define the lexical similarity and the results vary accordingly. Some of the most popular romance languages are spanish, french, italian, portuguese, and romanian. A lexical similarity of 1 or 100% would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. The higher the similarity the greater likelihood of mutual intelligence. The subdivision is based mainly on the use of the s for pluralization, the weakening of some consonants and the pronunciation of soft c as t. The problem is, this language isnt mentioned absolutely anywhere on the internet, except that very video and the channel of the person who provided the samples of it. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used. One thought on the mutual intelligibility of spanish dialects jhael 18 may, 2014 at 11. Romance languages mutual intelligibility post by mck74 wed feb 10, 2016 8. Finnish hungarian same family, but different languages, no mutual intelligibility. In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which. The level of mutual intelligibility is not as high as amongst romance or slavic languages, though.
The 3 most common questions about the romance languages. Germanic swarte, 2016, slavic golubovic, 2016 and romance voigt, in preparation. I am venezuelan and portuguese is quite the easiest latin language for me to understand. Its important to note that mutual intelligibility is highly subjective. Mutual intelligibility among the slavic languages by robert lindsay the mutual intelligibility mi of the languages of the slavic family is an interesting topic because many are mutually intelligible to one degree or another. Mutual intelligibility is a continuum that is, a gradient concept, marked by degrees of intelligibility, not by sharp divisions. Im just commenting here because of my fondness for procrastinating.
The romance languages nowadays rarely latin languages, or neolatin languages are the modern languages that evolved from vulgar latin between the third and eighth centuries. A lot of science and law remained in latin and french until the 19th century, for example. Mutual intelligibility in the romance languages beyond. Lexical and orthographic distances between germanic. Pdf mutual intelligibility among the romance languages. Whether or not i am a reliable source for the question of mutual intelligibility has been questioned in a debate on wikipedia. In addition, kajkavian croatian, spoken in northwest croatia and similar to slovenian, is not intelligible. In fact, uygur probably differs less from turkish than some dialects within germany and italy,for example. The intelligibility tests were carried out by means of an internet application.
Mutual intelligibility wikimili, the best wikipedia reader. These mutually intelligible languages will make you do a double take its important to note that mutual intelligibility is highly subjective. They are a subgroup of the italic languages in the indoeuropean language family today, around 800 million people are native speakers worldwide, mainly in the americas, europe, and parts of africa, as well as elsewhere. Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in europe. Various methods were used in this paper to determine mutual. Pdf on the romance languages mutual intelligibility semantic. Mutual int elligibility of languages in the slavic family hvar, vis, korcula, peljesac, the dalmatian coast at zadar and split, and inland at gacka. This is discussed in more but still possibly insufficient detail on the website. Password please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members its free and quick. For many languages it lists other languages which share intelligibility and lexical similarity. Languages understandable to englishspeakers without learning. Although not a true test of mutual intelligibility, blairs 1990. If related languages have a moderate degree of mutual intelligibility, educational policy makers may want to know if it would be more efficient to design a curriculum to bridge the intelligibility gap between the related languages klein and stegmann, 2000.
Mutual intelligibility of finnish and estonian vocabulary. If a procedure could be developed by which mutual intelligibility between any two languages could be established, we would have a powerful instrument, a. Northern germanic languages spoken in scandinavia form a dialect. Mutual intelligibility of chinese dialects experimentally. As part of a research on the mutual intelligibility of 16 european languages 3 main language families germanic, slavic and romance, this paper investigated the mutual intelligibility within the romance language family. Intelligibility figures for spanish versus other romance languages robert lindsay method. The lopsided mutual intelligibility of spanish and portuguese. Mutual intelligibility among the romance languages. Differential mutual intelligibility between portuguese and spanish beyond highbrow robert lindsay cortes 23 october, 20 at 5.
Language and intercultural communication, 9 4, 217229. Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in. To what extent are different romance languages mutually. Testing mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in an. However, the knowledge about the degree of mutual intelligibility and its linguistic and nonlinguistic bases is rather limited. We investigate the written intelligibility of the following romance languages. In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. Language varieties dialects and languages 2712009 4 mutual intelligibility between. All 16 official national languages within these three language families were.
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