Concept
Mutual intelligibility
Overview
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used to distinguish languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.
Intelligibility between varieties can be asymmetric; that is, speakers of one variety may be able to better understand another than vice versa. An example of this is the case between Afrikaans and Dutch. It is generally easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch.
In a dialect continuum, neighbouring varieties are mutually intelligible, but differences mount with distance, so that more widely separated varieties may not be mutually intelligible. Intelligibility can be partial, as is the case with Azerbaijani and Turkish, or significant, as is the case with Bulgarian and Macedonian.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Then follows in the second stage of expression in speech, an analysis of that total idea into its parts, in which these parts are always put into close relations with each other. Such relations are called by grammarians subject and predicate, noun and adjective, verb and adverb, &c. The grammatical meaning of these categories shows clearly that this analysis consists of a system of primary and secondary relations…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
States what Mutual intelligibility is.
Every mature art possesses a host of conventions as a basis: in so far as it is a language. Convention is a condition of great art, _not_ an obstacle to it.... Every elevation of life likewise elevates the power of communication, as also the understanding of man. _The power of living in other people's souls_ originally had nothing to do with morality, but with a physiological irritability of suggestion: "sympathy,"…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
States what Mutual intelligibility is.
But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest integration. How small is the degree of this integration, however, when compared with that reached in well-developed languages is shown both by the great length of the compound words used for things and acts of constant…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Mutual intelligibility is.
Related ideas
- Estonian language
- French language
- Persian language
- German language
- American Sign Language
- Grammar
- Hindi
- Indonesia
- Japanese language
- Latin alphabet
- Maltese language
- Azerbaijani language
- Mandarin Chinese
- Dutch language
- Norwegian language
- Linguistics
- Polish language
- Phoneme
- Portuguese language
- Russian language
- Romanian language
- Croatian language
- British Academy
- Swedish language
Place in the tradition
Part of Language.