Mutual intelligibility Totally Explained

Everything about Mutual Intelligibility totally explained

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's relatively symmetric that it's 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's 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

Germanic: Most Germanic languages share at least a common basic vocabulary, but are generally not mutually intelligible.
- Afrikaans, Dutch (including Flemish), Low German, and the most western forms of Low Saxon.
- To a limited extent, Dutch speakers can understand spoken sentences in German and in Frisian whereas speakers of German find it easier to read Dutch than to hear it spoken.
- 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 (Norway was in political union with Denmark from 1536-1814), 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.)
- Icelandic and Faroese
- English and Scots (if it's considered as a distinct language and not as a dialect of the former).

Slavic: Most Slavic languages have some degree of mutual intelligibility. Languages spoken in near-by countries tend to have higher propinquity. East Slavic languages are, in general, more comprehensible to both West Slavic and South Slavic speakers than West to South or South to West.

Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn all belong to the East Slavic language group and are mutually understandable to a fairly considerable degree, more when written than spoken. Russians have a harder time understanding non-Russians, because Russian was taught in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc to all students, unlike the other languages.
Belarusian and Ukrainian both have the same roots in the Ruthenian language but they also have many similarities to Polish due to the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth's cultural impact upon them. Ukrainians and Belarusians understand Polish much better than the other way around. Poles generally understand Ukrainian more than Belarusian because of closer pronunciation
Belarusian and Russian have similar pronunciation, which aids mutual intelligebility. Typically Russian-speakers can understand spoken Belarusian better than spoken Ukrainian for this reason.
Rusyn (more so with Carpatho-Rusyn than with Pannonian Rusyn) and Ukrainian; many Ukrainian linguists consider Rusyn to be a dialect of Ukrainian.
Bulgarian and Macedonian - the eastern group of the South Slavic branch. They have very similar grammars (which 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 in Macedonia after 1944. 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 rejected by the Macedonian linguists and politicians. In accordance with these positions, in diplomatic relations, Bulgarian side prefers not to use interpreters but the Macedonian side insists on their necessity. Bulgarians also understand the spoken form of other Slavic languages to some degree.
Serbo-Croatian and Russian are particularly close, but they're not mutually intelligible to those who had no preliminary exposure to them.
Torlakian dialect, spoken in Southern and Eastern Serbia, Northern Republic of Macedonia North-Western Bulgaria and South-Western Romania is mutually intelligible within these four regions and shares similarities with all of the corresponding Slavic languages in these countries. Torlakian isn't standardized, and its subdialects significantly vary in some features.
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin in the central western group of the South Slavic branch - extremely intelligible (may be considered one language, Serbo-Croatian).
Slovene and Kajkavian dialect of Croatian - mutually intelligible.
Czech, Slovak, Kashubian, Polish, and the Sorbian languages are 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 languages have a higher degree of mutual intelligibility, especially when written. The extremes are French and Romanian.

Italian and Spanish (and to a lesser degree Portuguese) have a varied exponent of typically medium intelligibility with the pronunciation being tolerably different.
Spanish (Castilian), Portuguese (especially Brazilian), 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, understandably due to a much simpler phonetic system in the latter.
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 identical to Romanian but has this name in the Republic of Moldova).
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 read the other language.

Indic

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

Iranian

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: Contrary to popular belief, all of the Celtic languages are too detached from each other to be classified as mutually intelligible anymore.

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're not mutually intelligible 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 intelligible. Cornish strongly resembles Breton in orthography but isn't comprehensible with it.

Semitic

Most varieties of Arabic are not mutually intelligible. However, there are four areas where the dialects are more similar, but the degree of intelligibility varies within each area: the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, and Libya) the Levant (Syria-Palestine-Israel-Lebanon-Jordan, and to a lesser extent Iraq), the Nile Valley (Egypt and Sudan) and the Arabian Peninsula.

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's the second tongue of majority of Filipinos, though many elders and illiterates from that region can't understand it). For example, should an Ilokano converse with a Cebuano, there's a high chance that they won't 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 isn't mutually intelligible with Tagalog at all.

Sino-Tibetan

Hokkien, Taiwanese, and Teochew, although all three may be considered dialects of Min Nan, a Chinese language. Although Hainanese is considered another dialect of Min Nan, it's mutually unintelligible with the other three dialects of Min Nan.(External Link

)

Tai-Kadai

Thai, Shan and Laotian

Laotian and the Isan Thai language. The two are extremely similar and may in fact be variants of one language.

Zhuang and Bouyei

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.

Oghuz

Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, and Salar
- Qashqai: closely related to Azerbaijani

Kypchak

Kazakh, Nogay , Karakalpak, Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz language holds special place in the group of Kypchak languages. It belongs to the Siberian Turkic languages and keeps grammar similarities with Altay language. It was strongly influenced by the Kypchak languages thus making the mutual understanding possible between Kyrgyz and Kypchak language speakers.

Finno-Ugric

Finnish and Karelian. Meänkieli and Kven are mutually intelligible, Far Northern Finnish dialects that the respective states (Sweden and Norway) classify as distinct languages for political reasons.

Estonian, Livonian and Votic.

Niger-Congo

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)

Afro-Asiatic

Many Berber variants, especially Northern Berber variants (sometimes known collectively as Tamazight)

English Creole

Manglish and Singlish.

Constructed languages

Esperanto and Ido are to a degree mutually intelligible.

Main article: Esperanto and Ido compared

Across language families

Interlingua (auxiliary language), Catalan, Occitan, standard Italian, Spanish, Ladino, Portuguese, Corsican and Galician (Romance languages) are mutually intelligible to some degree, as are Interlingua, English, and Danish (Germanic languages).

Spoken form only

Indo-European

Indo-Iranian

Hindi and Urdu (see also Hindustani language), and also Punjabi to a certain degree. However literary Urdu is far closer to Persian and may be unintelligible to a Hindi speaker, in the same manner, Hindi has an increasing number of Sansikrit words, which make it difficult for Urdu speakers to comprehend. This is especially true in Pakistan, where the Persianised Urdu is preferred, and the local population are not as exposed to Sansikritized Hindi as in India. Still in every day speech most Pakistanis are able to converse with most Indians in Urdu easily enough.
Bengali, Oriya and Assamese in the standard spoken forms. Not all dialects may be mutually intelligible.

Slavic languages - most neighboring languages are mutually intelligible

Belarusian and Ukrainian with Russian and, to a more limited degree, 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.
It is said that Slovak is the most easily understood by other Slavs of all Slavic languages, due to its central location and grammar. (External Link)

Germanic

German and Yiddish.

Romance

Speakers of Portuguese can usually understand Spanish better than Spanish speakers can understand Portuguese.
Rioplatense Spanish speakers can reportedly understand Italian better than other Spanish speakers.
Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, especially those of the South and South-East can reportedly understand spoken Standard Italian quite well.

Dravidian

Tamil and Malayalam are mutually intelligible. Any Malayali in Tamil Nadu, and any Tamilian in Kerala or Lakshadweep understands the local language easily. This is due to the common origin of these languages.

Turkic

Uzbek and Uyghur of the Chagatay group

Speakers of Azeri and Turkish can easily understand each other.

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

Maltese and Maghrebi Arabic especially Tunisian Arabic if written in the same script.

Modern Hebrew speakers can generally read Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew with little difficulty.

Sino-Tibetan

All Chinese languages share the same written standard. However, this isn't the case if vernacularisms or direct representations of the spoken forms are used.

Speakers of any modern Chinese dialects have little difficulty in reading post-Warring States classical Chinese literature usually upon completion of secondary education.

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.

Native speakers of Arabic can read a large number of words in Persian (Farsi) due to the large number of loan words that originated from Arabic and the use of the same alphabet, although probably not enough to follow the meaning of the whole text. The reverse is also true if the text is written in standard Arabic, but Iranians probably can't read anything written in one of the national dialects, and certainly not if the text is written in the Latin alphabet (an increasingly common practice among Arabs these days in internet chat rooms, email and txt messaging)

Indo-European

Germanic

Those proficient in Icelandic can read Old Norse with little difficulty, about as easily as Shakespeare for modern English speakers. (External Link)
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

Scottish Gaelic and Irish, sister variants of the Goidelic Celtic branch, see the Differences between Scottish Gaelic and Irish
Cornish 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, French, 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 (mostly words, not sentences), due to there being thousands of Romance words in the English language.

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".

Sign languages

British Sign Language, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language are mutually intelligible to some degree.

Catalan Sign Language, Valencian Sign Language and Spanish Sign Language are mutually intelligible to a very basic degree.

List of selected related languages not mutually intelligible

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's 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 isn't 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 and Faroese, especially in speech.
Faroese-speakers too have difficulties understanding Icelandic and vice versa, despite the similarities in grammar and vocabulary. (However, the phonetic differences are fairly extreme.)
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." ^{(External Link)}.Middle English is intelligible to Modern English speakers in its written form, but not its spoken form.

Romance languages:

French isn't mutually intelligible with Spanish, Portuguese or Romanian.
Catalan isn't mutually intelligible with French.
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. Lithuanian can be intelligible to a Latvian speaker to some degree but not vice versa.

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 they've different grammars.

Slovene isn't mutually intelligible with most of the other Slavic languages due to heavy influence from romance languages such as Italian and Venetian. An exception is the Kajkavian dialect of Croatian.
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. 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

Many spoken languages and dialects of Chinese are not mutually intelligible, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Min, Wu, Xiang and Gan.

Old Chinese and Middle Chinese are not mutually intelligible with modern Mandarin due to the changes in pronunciation of many words, and the change in grammar and usage.

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, despite the fact they're 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. They are also not mutually intelligible with the Uralic languages spoken in Russia. The two exceptions are Finnish-Karelian and Estonian-Votic mutual intelligibilities. With effort, Estonian speakers can learn to understand Finnish (and vice versa) rather quickly, but this isn't to be confused with true mutual intelligibility, the ability to understand without special effort. In terms of time since the split of the common proto-language, the distance between the languages is approximately similar to the distance between German and English for Finnish with Estonian, and English-Hindi for the distance between Finnish and Hungarian.

Modern Hebrew and Arabic are historically related and share many grammatical roots, forms and items of vocabulary, but are not mutually intelligible. The similarity is sufficient, however, to make learning Hebrew easier for Arabic speakers and vice-versa.

Many Nahuan dialects are neither intelligible with one another nor their ancestor language, Classical Nahuatl, even though all such dialects (including Classical Nahuatl) are commonly treated as a single Nahuatl language.

List of selected mutually intelligible languages now extinct

Biblical Hebrew, Moabite, Edomite, Ammonite and Phoenician. The first four of these formed the closely-related South Canaanite language language group and are sometimes termed "Hebrew languages".

Various Germanic languages in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, including Old Norse, Old English, Old Saxon, and the Gothic languages (Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic).

Faroese (not extinct) and Norn

Latin (nearly extinct) and Faliscan

Dalmatian and eastern Italian variants may have had some intelligibilityFurther Information

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