Mutual intelligibility Puns

I'm really obsessed with those videos where someone of a certain language speaks and then people from other related languages try to figure out what they're saying.

Such as this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk

He speaks in Latin and has a Spanish, Portuguese and Italian trying to guess the word he's describe.

Might be irrational but it annoys the hell out of me that half the comments in these videos are people saying something to the effect of - "It's crazy that as an Italian/French/Romanian/Portuguese speaker I could easily understand 90% of what they're saying, lol!"

Like, no you couldn't. First of all we get the written text and the listeners in the video don't, the text makes it 1000x easier than just listening. You may think you're understanding it but you're actually just reading it and using the 1/3 of words you potentially find a rough cognate for to decipher the general meaning...that is not "Understanding 90% of it easily".

I'm a native French speaker and when watching these videos where the main speaker is speaking in a related language - I can't make out fuck all without the written text, like maybe 1 out of 20 words or so. Like I get that the languages are related and that knowing one can help you decipher the others if the sentences are very simple and elementary but they are absolutely not mutually intelligible and it just makes me roll my eyes when people pretend they are. The reason the people in the videos are able to do it is because they are language "experts" and likely know multiple related languages to some degree, hence why they can all talk to each other throughout the video.

Anyways.

Like, if we go from the Netherlands to the east we have Frisian, which is mutually intelligible, then we have German which also is, but lesser so. Then, however, you hit a brick wall in Poland where nothing is understandable, instead of a little bit. How come it's not one long stream of lesser and lesser mutual intelligibility instead? Why don't neighbours always understand each other?

I'm curious about the extent to which the Germanic languages form a dialect continuum, after centuries of separation and the proliferation of diverging standards.

I understand that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish form a dialect continuum, and that there exists some degree of mutual intelligibility between Dutch and Low German, and between Dutch and Afrikaans. At the same time, German speakers may not be able to understand unfamiliar German dialects, and English speakers may not be able to understand unfamiliar Anglic lects.

I have two questions, one concrete, and one more speculative.

1. I gather that near the Dutch border, there is a degree of mutual intelligibility between Dutch and Low German. To what extent can speakers of Low German close to the Danish border understand Danish?

2. Suppose you speak English, Swedish and Yiddish, but no Dutch, and suppose you meet a monolingual Dutch speaker (an unlikely scenario, but indulge me!). How likely is it that you could hold a simple conversation with this person?

If a non native speaker was to learn slovak for its supposed more regular grammar, would they be able to communicate and adapt to life in Czech republic?

Are the languages such that a native speaker of one can understand a native speaker of the other?

One day, while at a Swiss airport, I passed by a family with three kids, all of whom were conversing in rapid German, French, and Italian(all in the same conversation). I realize this could just be fluency in multiple languages, but given the regions’ proximity to each other I’d like to know about how each language was impacted by the others.

I’m curious as to how common this is in Switzerland and especially with regards to the degree Swiss language variants are similar to each other. I’d be happy to elaborate on my question if you’re confused about something :)

Edit: I DO speak German and have a decent grasp on French. I lived near the Swiss border for a while and know what Swiss German sounds like.

The languages diverged today, but as I understand they were somewhat closer to latin.

Of course there were standards (Classic, Ecclestial) which scribes knew.

But do we have any accounts of how much could common folks understand each others romance dialects, between these romanized regions?

When it comes to the dialects of Italy and Standard Italian regarding mutual intelligibility, I’d say there’s always a bit of controversy surrounding it. Now, I’d speculate that the mutual intelligibility between an Italian dialect and Standard Italian is probably quite low to say the least, I mean Spanish most likely has a higher degree of mutual intelligibility with Standard Italian than most dialects of Italy. But in comparison to other dialects, which dialect would you say has the highest degree of mutual intelligibility with Standard Italian? If we take a look at some of the most famous and widely spoken dialects of Italy, such as Neapolitan, Sardinian, Sicilian, Tuscan and Venetian, and compare them to Standard Italian. Which one out of these mentioned dialects has the highest degree of mutual intelligibility with Standard Italian?

Thanks for the answer(s)!

Do you guys think that Dutch or German would enter the realm of mutual intelligibility if Modern English were to be 'Anglified' (including grammar restoration)? I've read that if not for the Norman Invasion, Dutch would likely be mutually intelligible. Is there a chance of regaining this?

To me, one of the strongest practical applications of Anglish is making other germanic languages easier to learn.

is there a reason why the Slavic languages are so mutual intelligible compared to the germanic languages. i looks like, for me, that slavic languge speakers can generally, but especially its "subgroups", eg west-slavic, understand each other. but i, a german speaker, can only barely understand dutch (helped by my english knowledge), but cant understand any of the Scandinavian languages. woudnt be able to understand english either if it wasnt tought in school, but i i know the reason on that case

I just learned today that mutual intelligibility can be 'asymmetric', where one speaker can better understand the other speaker when both are using their respective languages. This was somewhat counter-intuitive/paradoxical to me, since I assumed the word 'mutual' meant that both speakers would experience equal 'levels' of similarity when speaking their respective languages to each other.

But after some thought, I realized that I guess every pair of 'mutually intelligible' languages is asymmetric to some extent, even if the asymmetry is extremely minute, and that this asymmetry can fluctuate between the languages depending on the context of discussion.

What are some examples of very asymmetric mutual intelligibility?

I know they are considered different languages, but how mutually intelligible are they? For example, Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, not seperate languages, but are about 5-10% mutually intelligible.

I was talking to a Chinese friend recently who said that Mandarin and Cantonese were mutually intelligible. It reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago on Wikipedia that I can’t find now, but it went something like this:

>Mutual intelligibility between languages can be very hard to study because of political reasons. For example, speakers of distant Arabic dialects tend to say that they do understand each other even when they don’t, and speakers of Urdu and Hindi will say they don’t understand each other even when they do.

Has anyone encountered phenomena like this/methodology to deal with it? How does this impact the mutual intelligibility criteria for language classification?

Edit: some other places where I imagine it might come into play are the Balkans and Scandinavia

How intelligible are Spanish and Portuguese? How does this compare to Syrian Arabic and Maghrebi Arabic? How about Bengali and Assamese, or Turkish and Azeri?

In general, is there a numerical metric of intelligibility? How do we decide when languages X and Y are "more intelligible" than languages Z and W?

Forewrit says it all.

Good evening my Neighbours! I have a question about the North Germanic languages.

Few years back when I was doing my Erasmus, I had a Swedish and a Norwegian roommate. They were able to communicate to each other in their native languages without any problem. However, I’ve heard that Swedes have hard time understanding Danish, which I find weird since it’s supposed to be a closer relative to Swedish than Norwegian. And then there’s also the Swedish dialect spoken by ~300k Finns called Finlandssvenska, which has been influenced by Finnish quite a lot.

Sooo, to me as a Finnish speaking Finn it’s hard to compare these languages, but it would be interesting to know which language is the most intelligible to you. And I’m particularly interested on how much Finlandssvenska you are able to understand, if you have encountered any Swedish speaking Finns.

puss och kram :D

Hey! I come from the Mountain Jewish community; a community of Jews from the Caucasus who descend from Jews of the former Persian Empires. Our (nearly extinct) language is Juhuri, a dialect of Old Persian and our elders refer to it as "Farsi".

Now, I'm not a speaker myself, nor do I speak modern Persian, so I never could tell myself how mutually intelligible the two languages are and always wondered. Here are some examples. Take into account that the Caucasus has been under Russian control for the 200+ last years so I imagine there is quite some Russian influence.

https://youtu.be/0YInwYsN5Ds

https://youtu.be/UEkZ1WeYhCo

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=W7ZSky-NQ

I'd love to hear your input. Thanks!

Phrasing this gave me a headache: to clarify, what language can claim to be mutually intelligible the farthest back? I bet it would be Arabic, but what do you folk think?

Since the Mohawk (Kanien'keha:ka), Seneca (Onondawaga), Oneida (Onyota'a:ka), Onondaga (Onöñda’gaga’), and Cayuga (Gayogoho:no') bordered each other as nations in what is now Northern New York pre-colonization, and formed together the Haudenosaunee confederacy, I've been wondering how mutually intelligible the languages are of these respective nations.

Just as a side question, is there a reason why there are more speakers of Kanien'keha than there are speakers of the other languages of the Haudeonosaunee?

I'm jumping on the Nordic Noir bandwagon a little late, as I'm just now watching The Bridge on Netflix. As a Finn who speaks Finland-Swedish better than the average Finn, I really cannot understand almost any spoken Danish. Even many Sweden-Swedish dialects are quite difficult for me to understand.

So my question is: how realistic is the portrayal in The Bridge of people in Malmö and Copenhagen speaking their native languages in perfect harmony and never having very many trouble understanding each other?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_languages?wprov=sfla1

I've heard from some that Icelandic would have been mutually intelligible with West Norse, and from others that it would likely have been difficult, even when not taking the accent into consideration.

Additionally, I'm curious as to how close West Norse and East Norse were to each other, and how mutually intelligible they were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics?wprov=sfla1

For those who are native speakers or have spent a while studying Ukrainian, is it difficult to understand the various dialects of Ukrainian?

E.g. if a non-native speaker were to only learn Middle Dnieprian/standardized literary Ukrainian, would they have a very difficult time communicating with a native Ukrainian speaker if the speaker is talking only in their dialect?

Thanks in advance!

I've been doing some research into testing mutual intelligibility between languages/dialects. I've come across F. Blair's Survey On A Shoestring , which explains the process whereby a list of words is compared to the same list in another language. Every word is given a weighting based on how similar it is to the corresponding word in the second language, which is then totalled up with all the other scores to calculate an approximate percentage intelligibility between the two languages, regardless of whether the tester speaks the languages or not.

I would very much like to get this book, but until I do, I'm wondering whether anyone has any specifics on how this is actually done. How are the weightings decided upon? Are they done phoneme by phoneme or by whole words? How does one decide how similar two words are?

If anyone has answers to any of these questions, I would definitely be interested, so I hope to hear back from this thread soon!

I couldn't find any articles through Google scholar but thought this might be a good forum for this.

Are there any studies on how age affects a speakers ability to understand a similar language with little or no prior knowledge?

For example, how mutually intelligible are German and Dutch for two five year old speakers? What about for two forty year old speakers?

And what about other languages? Are some combinations, like Mongolian and Buryat or Norwegian and Swedish, more uniformly mutually intelligible?

And no offense to our Finnish friends - but I'll have to get back to you guys with another question.

Are Danish, Swedish and Norwegian (and I guess Icelandic to a lesser degree) considered to be discrete languages from each other that share some similarity, or would one be able to make an argument that they're dialects of something else?

How would this compare to say High German and Swiss German - where Swiss German is more often seen as a dialect rather than it's own language? (I live in Southern Germany, although as a non-native. Swiss German can be pretty impenetrable to listen to).

Is the written comprehension in the Scandic languages somewhat equivalent to Portuguese and Spanish? Or Italian and Spanish?

Thanks for any info - I'm very curious about this because it seems I hear different things from different (Swedish) people quite often.

So... I was thinking of doing an exercise where I post something pretty basic in my romance conlang and other people with romlangs try to translate it into their language to see how mutually intelligible some romlangs are. Heres the sentence

ci estio teu

[ki εstio tε]

Translation: who are you?

Does anyone know easily it is for speakers of Ojibwe to understand Oji-Cree and vice versa?

Which other languages (if any) do mandarin speakers have some level of mutual intelligibility with? And to what degree? Are there any dialects in China that are very similar, or others that are hard to understand for mandarin speakers?

I assume Italian? since its closest to Latin, and according to some native speakers?