# Languages That Are Mutually-Intelligible. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 14, 2018, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903 "2018-07-14T16:46:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/41 "2018-07-15T04:08:56Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > I suspect that listening to it would be clearer. Hm. I dunno about that–here’s [a lecture (in Scots about Scots)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cENbkHS3mnY) from someone who is an academic. It’s a lot like how you describe that biblical passage: Every so often, it just veers off the rails and sounds incomprehensible. But much of its makes sense (especially once you pick up on the meaning of words like “leid”). But again, that guy’s an academic, speaking (I presume) a pretty high register of Scots, about high-falutin’ topics like history and linguistics. (Note that in English, “history” and “linguistics” ultimately come from Greek and Latin roots; and words like that very often are recognizably cognate in many European languages, even ones that aren’t very closely related: _histoire_; _Linguistik_.) By contrast, here’s [a very brief clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le_uNGdpa4c) from, I presume, Scotland’s answer to Jerry Springer. I…I _think_ they’re speaking Scots (and not Scottish Gaelic). ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/42 "2018-07-15T04:09:08Z")
The other part of intelligibility is the receptiveness or flexibility of the listener and their capacity to manage problems in comprehension. Travelling through Czechslovakia, as it was back then, I found my school-boy and fairly meh Serbo-Croatian was readily understood. And when words failed us the Czechs seamlessly rolled into the equivalent word in German, Russian or whatever other language they had. They were very comfortably multilingual. When hitchhiking near Bratislava a trademan picked me up and was trying to explain what he did. Eventually, having gone through his half dozen languages and exhausting my pathetic two, he said something like ‘Chemiska PB’. He’d run out of languages but very comfortably segued into the Table of Elements to explain he was a lead piping saleman. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/43 "2018-07-15T04:55:27Z")
I find that Dutch is rather hard to read since the rules are harder to learn and there are weird (to English speakers) phonemes, while languages like Norwegian have easier rules so once you know them it seems almost like near-English with idiosyncratic spelling. > [@Jim\_B](#): > > I just know I once read an interesting entry in an almanac once. (You all do remember almanacs. That’s what we used before we had the internet;).) Anyways, they said speakers of Swedish could almost understand other Scandinavian languages, I forget exactly which. The general rule is: spoken Norwegian and Swedish are closer than either are to Danish. The more popular Norwegian writing style (Bokmal) is closer to Danish and vice versa than either are to written Swedish. > [@](#): > > This is ironic, because Polish and Russian are both Slavic. But they are slightly different branches of that tree, I believe. East Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian. West Slavic: Czech, Slovak, Polish. Western South Slavic: Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montengrin), Slovene. Eastern South Slavic: Bulgarian, as well as the almost identical Macedonian. Albanian in Kosovo: non-Slavic language. Plus some minor languages like Sorbian. > [@clairobscur](#): > > I remember that when I visited Yugoslavia, people were supposed to speak Serbo-Croatian. Now, they speak Serb, or Croatian, or Bosnian, apparently. However, the funny thing is that, among the various Serbo-Croatian dialects, they all picked the same as the basis for their new fangled national languages : Shtokavian ( [Shtokavian - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtokavian) ). So I can only assume that all these “national” languages are more similar to each other than the different dialects within any of these countries are. A given Serb and Croat may understand each other better than two Croatians from opposite sides of the country. > [@John\_Mace](#): > > Something happened in or near Croatia (I assume) or Dublin or Germany with some sort of transport (189 passengers) and there was blood involved. OK: 189 Irish-Croats were traveling in Germany and someone started bleeding. Or something. 🙂 It’s okay, Reddit’s r/ireland is right now an almost completely pro-Croatian page due to them beating England in the World Cup 🙂 > [@RivkahChaya](#): > > On another subject: **American Sign Language** and\*\* French Sign Language \*\*are very close, that they are mutually intelligible as long as you stick to simple subjects. Also Irish Sign Language is in the same family while the British one is not, so trans-Atlantic communication is easier than across the Irish Sea. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 8:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/44 "2018-07-15T08:27:05Z")
> [@Ludovic](#): > > I’m persuaded by the Wikipedia page on Scots that it is a separate language (keeping in mind of course that Scots also speak Standard Scottish English which _is_ a dialect of English.) The clincher for me was that English and Scots started to diverge before English became Modern English, and you can’t really be a dialect of a language you were never part of to begin with. English and Broad Scots are separate languages in the English subfamily of Anglo-Frisian, but the same Wikipedia describes a seamless continuum between Standard Scottish English and the Broadest Scots. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/45 "2018-07-15T09:08:06Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > What you need to understand is that there is no precise dividing line between two varieties being two dialects of a single language and being two closely related languages. … The difference between two distinct dialects and two distinct languages is arbitrary. To some extent it’s a matter of politics… The fuzzy continuum extends further. Two different languages may be close enough to make bilingualism easy. Or, even when bilingualism is difficult, the languages may be similar enough to make it easy to borrow grammatical forms. Whether two dialects which neighbor geographically move toward or away from each other is often a matter of politics. The English of Wessex and the “English” of the Danelaw may have been separate languages before the Norman Conquest, but (because “my enemy’s enemy is my ally”) came into contact with each other as the English rallied to resist Norman rule. (I think there’s evidence that early dialects of Old or Middle English were sometimes mutually unintelligible — even some dialects of Modern English are unintelligible!) When a third dialect is constructed, perhaps politically, as a compromise between two other dialects, the process is called koineization if the sources are mutually intelligible, but there is no general term (except pidginization or creolization!) when the sources are separate languages. I wonder if koineization might be a useful description for new dialects, perhaps including London Middle English, that arose from very close but separate languages. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 9:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/46 "2018-07-15T09:55:04Z")
> [@](#): > > … I wonder if koineization might be a useful description for new dialects, perhaps including London Middle English, that arose from very close but separate languages. Googling just now I see that Peggy Mohan, [cited in this pdf](http://udel.edu/~pcole/fieldmethods2010/siegel.Koines%20and%20koineization.pdf) was willing to extend the definition of koineization: [In 1976 Peggy Mohan defined] koineization as: ‘a convergence and levelling between language varieties which are either closely related genetically or typologically very much alike.’ … koines and pidgins differ in the degree of simplification: “the common syntactic core and similar morphological categories and contrasts make the drastic levelling of pidginization unnecessary.” (Her viewpoint may not have become popular, but Googling further I see Ms. Mohan is a brilliant teacher and author.) ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 10:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/47 "2018-07-15T10:22:17Z")
One thing I learned from studying both Uyghur and Uzbek is the asymmetricality between them. They are very closely related languages that were both derived relatively recently from Chaghatai, the literary language of Central Asia until about a century ago. The difference is that Uzbek has become phonologically simplified from its ancestor, while Uyghur has developed a lot of phonological strangeness mostly affecting the vowels, which change pronunciation as a word is inflected. The upshot is that Uyghur speakers can understand spoken Uzbek quite well, while spoken Uyghur is very difficult for Uzbek speakers. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/48 "2018-07-15T11:27:15Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Of course, ASL (and presumably FSL) is much more “onomatopoeic” than audible languages, and that’s going to help inter-intelligibility a lot. In fact, even without knowledge of a formal sign language, humans from different cultures will often understand a lot of each others’ gestures. “Imitative”, if you please, if only because calling a language for the deaf “onomatopoeic” is a bit much for my poor, abused ears. Anyway, defining “language” is to linguistics what defining “species” is to biology, in that there will never be a last word on either. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 12:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/49 "2018-07-15T12:02:11Z")
Yeah, I knew that “onomatopoeic” wasn’t the right word there, hence the scare quotes. The point is that a lot of the signs in some way resemble the thing they represent. Aside: I once had a conversation through interpretation with a deaf relative, and was asked what it was I did. I’m never sure how much detail to give in answer to that question, so given the difficulty of the communication medium, I anticipated follow-up questions, and answered “Physics. Relativity. What Einstein did.”. I almost fell over laughing when I saw the sign for “Einstein”, because it was a near-perfect representation of his wild hair. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/50 "2018-07-15T12:09:40Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Of course, ASL (and presumably FSL) is much more “onomatopoeic” than audible languages, and that’s going to help inter-intelligibility a lot. In fact, even without knowledge of a formal sign language, humans from different cultures will often understand a lot of each others’ gestures. > [@Derleth](#): > > “Imitative”, if you please, if only because calling a language for the deaf “onomatopoeic” is a bit much for my poor, abused ears. “Iconic” is the term for signs that look like what they are. But not all signs are iconic, and many that began that way have moved far away from iconicity. Sign languages are not gestures. ASL and LSF are mutually intelligible because they are related. British Sign Language, for example, is completely unrelated to American Sign Language, and Deaf people from the UK and US cannot understand one another. They can resort to gesture, which Deaf people are skilled at, from doing so with hearing people all their lives, or, because they share a written language, they can text on their phones. But Deaf UKers in the US are lost until they have some time to learn ASL. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/51 "2018-07-15T12:37:24Z")
Of course not all signs are iconic, but it’s a larger proportion than words in audible languages. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/52 "2018-07-15T13:30:55Z")
> [@Kolak\_of\_Twilo](#): > > I had a Dutch person say it is pretty easy for them to understand spoken American English even if they haven’t studied it. I seriously doubt that. Many Dutch people speak French, too, so that would help a bit, especially with written English, but the pronunciation between Dutch and English can be quite different. But maybe they are exposed to so much English media that they learn quite a bit without formal study. Take a Dutch speaker who hasn’t been exposed to English and he’s going to recognize some common words here and there, but no way would he understand a conversation. As it happens, I was having dinner at the bar at one of my favorite restaurants last night when a foreign couple sat down next to me. I listened to the for awhile and couldn’t quite figure out what they were speaking. I was pretty sure it was a Scandinavian language, so I asked them. They smiled and asked me to guess, and I said “Danish”. Nope. Norwegian? Nope. Swedish! Yes. I was a bit surprised because normally Swedish and Norwegian sound very sing-songy to me, and Danish sounds more flat. They sounded flat, but I guess I missed the lilt-- maybe because the place was kind of noisy. I asked asked them about mutual intelligibility and they said Danes, Norwegians and Swedes just speak to each other in their own languages and usually it’s no problem. ---
**Author:** ![Ignotus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ecc23a/32.png) [@Ignotus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ignotus)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/53 "2018-07-15T14:07:39Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Of course not all signs are iconic, but it’s a larger proportion than words in audible languages. True; but this simply reflects the fact that most or all signs are fairly recent innovations. It’s the same thing in audible languages. The PIE word for “raven” was something like _korh_ (omitting diacritics). This is a pretty accurate rendition of the most common calling sound of the bird itself. Later, it morphed into Latin _corvus_ (still pretty accurate, if you omit the masculine suffix) and, with the change k\>h and metathesis of the _r_ and vowel, into Proto-Germanic _hrabn(az)_, which gave us Icelandic _hrafn_ (h is still audible, and f is pronounced as voiceless b before n) and, of course, English _raven_ and Danish _ravn_, which are much less readily recognized as onomatopoetic. The cognate of this word has gone extinct in Swedish, though, which instead has the fairly recent innovation _korp_, even better than the PIE word and easily understood from a pure acoustic/imitative standpoint. It will probably be much more less so in a few thousand years, if the language itself spawns descendants lasting into that future… ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/54 "2018-07-15T14:45:16Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > When a third dialect is constructed, perhaps politically, as a compromise between two other dialects, the process is called koineization if the sources are mutually intelligible, but there is no general term (except pidginization or creolization!) when the sources are separate languages. This reminds me of an article I saw recently somewhere. The author, a foreigner living in Indonesia, learned the official Indonesian language, which is a somewhat artificial language based on various dialects of Malay. And then they find they can’t understand anyone, because no one uses that language. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/55 "2018-07-15T16:06:53Z")
That’s clearly an exaggeration. About 10% of the population of Indonesia speak Indonesian as their native language. It’s used for most of the mass media in Indonesia. The majority of the population speak it either as their first or second language. There are at least 300 native languages in Indonesia. Whatever language you speak in Indonesia will make someone unhappy, but you have to make a choice. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/56 "2018-07-15T19:33:04Z")
Something I’m sure a few folks around here would know: Are Quenya and Sindarin mutually intelligible? ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/57 "2018-07-15T19:42:01Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Something I’m sure a few folks around here would know: Are Quenya and Sindarin mutually intelligible? Generally not readily. When the Noldor returned to ME after the Curse, they found it problematic to talk to the Sindar of ME. Of course, even before the Noldor left ME originally, they’d travelled apart from the Sindar and their tongues were already diverging. The [Ardalambion](https://folk.uib.no/hnohf/index.htm) website explores all JRRT’s languages in depth, and has some special sections on how elven languages diverged, resulting not just in Sindarin, but variants like Teleri, Doriathrin, Nandorin (Danian), and others. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/58 "2018-07-15T20:33:45Z")
Wow, that was _breg_! 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/59 "2018-07-16T00:14:21Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Wow, that was _breg_! 🙂 _Thand_ too, I hope. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903/60 "2018-07-16T04:10:19Z")
Which is impressive, considering that those two languages diverged that far in a single generation. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-are-mutually-intelligible/817903.md?page=4)