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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 426

Part of Session 179: Mutual intelligibility of closely related languages in a multilingual Europe (Other abstracts in this session)

Mutual Intelligibility in the Germanic, Romance and Slavic Language Area

Authors: Swarte, Femke; Voigt, Stefanie; Golubovic, Jelena
Submitted by: Swarte, Femke (University of Groningen, Netherlands, The)

If languages are mutually intelligible that means that two people each can speak their own language without having problems understanding each other. The Scandinavian languages are known for being mutually intelligible to a large extent. A great number of investigations has been carried out on the factors that play a role for mutual intelligibility of Scandinavian languages. 

However, the number of studies about mutual intelligibility of other European languages is rather low. Therefore it is not surprising that in 2007 the High Level Group on Multilingualism (HLGM) pointed out that there is not enough knowledge about mutual intelligibility between European languages and that the status of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in Europe should be investigated.

In this paper the mutual intelligibility of the languages within the Germanic, Romance and Slavic language areas and the prospective of  ELF in those language areas is investigated. For each language area, the languages that are official languages in the European Union have been chosen as the test languages. This leads to a selection of Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish for the Germanic area; French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian  for the Romance area; and Bulgarian, Croatian[1], Czech, Polish, Slovak and Slovene for the Slavic area.

The intelligibility between the languages mentioned above will be tested by means of a cloze test for spoken as well as written language in a web-based experiment. In a cloze test, participants are faced with texts from which a certain number of words has been deleted. The task is to fill in these blanks. This way, it is possible to measure the intelligibility of coherent texts. The cloze test will be used to test the intelligibility of both closely related languages and ELF. The intelligibility scores will be correlated with linguistic factors, such as phonetic and lexical distances, as well as extra-linguistic factors, such as language contact and language attitudes. This has never been done on such a large scale. Since the results will provide an insight in the mutual intelligibility of the languages mentioned above and explain which factors play a role for the mutual intelligibility of languages, they will be of great interest for linguists as well as policy makers in the European Union. This paper will elaborate on the methodological challenges of intelligibility research and present some preliminary results of the investigation into the intelligibility of the languages within the Germanic, Romance and Slavic language areas.

[1] Note that Croation is not yet an official language of the European Union. Since it will be in 2013, Croation is included in the project.