Mutual intelligibility

Mutual intelligibility is where the speakers of one language can understand another language because they are alike. This is sometimes (but not always) used to decide whether they are different languages or different dialects.

There are noticeable differences in accent, vocabulary, and spelling between British and General American English, but speakers can largely understand each other without serious problems.  These dialects are therefore mutually intelligible.

Sometimes, even different languages can be mutually intelligible. Hindi and Urdu are called different languages, but speakers of both languages can largely understand each other if they are using everyday language. This is because the two languages used to be dialects of Hindustani, the official language of British India until India became independent. Since the two languages are so alike, they are sometimes called together as Hindi-Urdu.

Also, dialects of a certain language can sometimes be mutually unintelligible. Chinese, for example, has hundreds of different dialects, and many native speakers of those dialects cannot understand each other without knowing the other's dialect. For example, the local dialects of Beijing and Shanghai are Mandarin and Shanghainese, or Wu Chinese, respectively.

If natives from each of these cities were to talk to each other in their native dialects, they would not understand each other. This is because they are too different from each other. This is why the governments of China and Taiwan want their citizens to speak Standard Mandarin in public so that there can be a spoken dialect of Chinese everyone can understand. While the spoken dialects are mutually unintelligible, they all use the same written code, Chinese alphabet and mutual understanding is possible in written communications.

Such examples show the difference between language and dialect to be hard to define, even for linguists.

When a speaker of a language can understand what a speaker of another language is saying but not the other way around, it is called asymmetric intelligibility. An example of this is Portuguese and Spanish. While Portuguese speakers claim to be able to understand Spanish without issues, Spanish speakers, on the other hand, have a very difficult time understanding |Portuguese speakers. This situation is actually quite common across languages.

Related pages
Language varieties and styles
Comparative linguistics
Dialectology

Linguistics
Bilingualism
Multilingualism
Iranic languages
List of languages
Japonic languages
Afro-Asiatic languages
Indo-Iranian languages
Sino-Tibetan languages
Indo-European languages

Category:Language