I have long wondered about mutual intelligibility among the following languages:
Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian, and north German coast Plattdeutsch.
I’m German, from the rhineland area. I understand Plattdeutsch rather well but I can’t speak it apart from a few phrases (my first husband is from there and he taught me).
Dutch in the other hand is really hard for me, it’s a real foreign language. I might understand the odd word, but not much more…
I have an anecdote from my grandma, who spoke Sauerländer Platt (it’s important to stress the fact that almost every village in Northern Germany has (or rather HAD, since Platt is waning everywhere) its own slightly differing version of Platt). She used to tell an incident from her youth when she was taking a walk with a friend in a park in Bonn, and they got to know a Dutch couple. My grandma also spoke perfect High German, but she told that she conversed with the Dutch people easily, she using her Platt and they their native Dutch.
Now I don’t know Platt anymore (like almost my whole generation), though I understand a bit of it, and many words from Platt entered my still spoken local (Westphalian) dialect. I also make quite good guesses at written Dutch texts knowing German, a bit of Platt and English, but I’m absolutely unable to follow a Dutch conversation or radio program.
I don’t know of any linguists who consider Flemish a language. It’s a dialect of Dutch and highly intelligible. Afrikaans has diverged enough to be a language but it’s intelligibility is fairly high with Dutch with some difficulty. Limburgish too.
From what I understand, Frisian is a group of languages that aren’t even intelligible amongst themselves, but West Frisian is most widely spoken and the one you’ve probably heard of. It’s in between Dutch and English enough to be somewhat familiar in the words but not very intelligible.
My Flemish friend told me a while back that he has little difficulty understanding Dutch, and vice versa.
I met a Dutchman and a South African chap at a chess tournament. They could analyse their chess game perfectly well using just Dutch and Afrikaans. 
So that’s a technical conversation proving the two languages are very compatible.
I studied German in school, which would have been Hochdeutsch, and found that speakers of Dutch could pretty well understand me. I don’t remember if I understood them.
I’ve never learned Plattdeutsch, but if I try to read Dutch outloud, using my understanding of Hochdeutsch and English, I can get the idea of the text. Useful for reading Dutch beer bottles.
It is easier for Flemish speakers to understand dutch than vice versa, but a Dutch speaker will still easily understand Flemish. Conversations about complex issues can be had with each speaker only using their own language.
It is easier for a Dutch speaker to understand Afrikaans than vice versa. The difference is greater than between Flemish and Dutch. Reading Afrikaans is easier than listening to it, for me (grew up Dutch)
Frisian is somewhere between English and Dutch, with lotsa extras. I had a Frisian roommate in college, when he spoke with another Frisian, I could track every 5th word or so.
I had a roommate from Cologne in grad school. He could get the gist of my Dutch conversations, so I would think a conversation about simple issues could be had with a Dutch speaker and someone who spoke Kölsch platt.
With my Dutch and German I can track north coast Plattdeutsch. I think with just Dutch that’d be hard.
This brings up the point that mutual intelligibility is hard to ascertain in practice here - you will find few Dutch speakers who truly understand only Dutch.
When I was very young there were still people who spoke the town dialect, which I understood and spoke to an extent. The dialect of the next town over was unintelligible to me, but then I had not yet learned any additional languages. (These west coast town dialects seemed to have some Frisian influence, by the way, and lots of vowel shifts. )
What about Yiddish?
It’s also a Germanic language, mostly derived from Old High German. This page says Yiddish is not a dialect of German, but there is a reasonable amount of mutual intelligibility.
Yes but Yiddish is not a low German language. My parents once had a German neighbor and my father–whose mother tongue was Yiddish–could communicate with him with some difficulty.
I also understand that there is a part of the NW German coast whose language is called Frisian.
The Frisian on the German NW coast is North-Frisian. The “main” Frisian (as in, with most speakers) is West-Frisian, spoken in Friesland in the Netherlands, a couple of islands, and a little in nearby areas. West Frisian has many Dutch influences, and North Frisian has German and Danish influences, and there have been enough shifts over time on top of that, that they are not, or no longer, mutually intelligible. Both are Frisian languages, not dialects of another language. There is also East-Frisian, spoken in Germany’s East Frisia, which isn’t a Frisian language but a Low Franconian dialect, if I remember correctly. East Frisian I can track pretty easily, not so for West Frisian, and North Frisian is as intelligible as Danish to me. (I can figure some words, but cannot track even a simple conversation)
North Frisian is interesting. It’s a linguistic kin (in the Anglo-Frisian group) to English, since a predecessor to North Frisian was kin to Anglo-Saxon, which became Old English.
I’ve never tried to track a conversation in North Frisian, so I don’t know about the mutual intelligibility, but on-line resources seem to show that many root words (counting, family relationships, etc.) are pronounced almost identically to the English equivalents.
For the sake of examples: Aachen, Germany and Maastricht, The Netherlands are less than 40 km (25 mi) apart by train. Are the local dialects close to intelligible?
In that area of the Netherlands, the dialects van be so strong that they won’t understand you one village over. That’s why pretty much all people speak normal Dutch as well.
Verstuurd vanaf mijn moto g(6) met Tapatalk
The language spoken today in East Frisia (thus often inaccurately called East Frisian) is a Low German variety.
There is an actual East Frisian language, and there is even a pocket where it is still spoken today: the Saterland. Seeltersk, as the language is called by the locals, has survived among a couple of thousand people who had lived there, isolated by bogs and moors and with little contact to the Low-German-speaking world around them.
Wiki describes the phenomenon and lists some prominent examples, although I don’t see Frisian here.
I speak Afrikaans natively, and I understand Dutch/Vlaams well enough, but written way more than spoken. I actually find spoken Vlaams a little easier to understand than spoken normal Dutch.
Thanks. That was interesting.
Previous thread on English-Frisian, started in 2004, necromanced in 2016: