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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 ...
Linguistic distance is the measure of how different one language (or dialect) is from another. [1] [2] Although they lack a uniform approach to quantifying linguistic distance between languages, linguists apply the concept to a variety of linguistic contexts, such as second-language acquisition, historical linguistics, language-based conflicts, and the effects of language differences on trade.
Meanwhile, a Sicilian-speaking person would have a greater degree of mutual intelligibility with a speaker of the more closely related Neapolitan language, but far less mutual intelligibility with a person speaking Sicilian Gallo-Italic, a language that developed in isolated Lombard emigrant communities on the same island as the Sicilian language.
Most assessments of mutual intelligibility of varieties of Chinese in the literature are impressionistic. [71] Functional intelligibility testing is time-consuming in any language family, and usually not done when more than 10 varieties are to be compared. [72] However, one 2009 study aimed to measure intelligibility between 15 Chinese provinces.
The term is generally meant to imply a lack of mutual intelligibility between the two languages. If two adjacent languages or dialects are mutually intelligible, no firm border will develop, because the two languages can continually exchange linguistic inventions; this is known as a dialect continuum. A "language island" is a language area that ...
This is a further factor in lessening the mutual intelligibility of Breton on the one hand and the other two Brythonic languages. There is as further complicating factor. Although Cornish is geographically mid-way between Welsh and Breton its phonology appears to have been very different from both Welsh and Breton in a number of significant ways.
The variations due to differing wordlists weigh on this. For example, lexical similarity between French and English is considerable in lexical fields relating to culture, whereas their similarity is smaller as far as basic (function) words are concerned. Unlike mutual intelligibility, lexical similarity can only be symmetrical.
In statistics, probability theory and information theory, pointwise mutual information (PMI), [1] or point mutual information, is a measure of association. It compares the probability of two events occurring together to what this probability would be if the events were independent .