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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.
For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties, and so they are sometimes considered language families instead. Conversely, colloquial registers of Hindi and Urdu are almost completely mutually intelligible, and are sometimes classified as one language ...
It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties. [5] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
However, each of these groups contains mutually unintelligible varieties. [26] ISO 639-3 and the Ethnologue assign language codes to each of the top-level groups listed above except Min and Pinghua, whose subdivisions are assigned five and two codes respectively. [79] Some linguists refer to the local varieties as languages, numbering in the ...
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. [1]
Geographically distant colloquial varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible, and some linguists consider them distinct languages. [21] However, research by Trentman & Shiri indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts ...
The cants are mutually unintelligible. The word has also been used as a suffix to coin names for modern-day jargons such as "medicant", a term used to refer to the type of language employed by members of the medical profession that is largely unintelligible to lay people. [1]
Subgroup (片 piàn), which may be mutually unintelligible with other subgroups [note 3] Cluster (小片 xiǎopiàn), which may be mutually unintelligible with other clusters; Local dialect (点 diǎn), which are the dialects sampled by the Atlas; In the list below, [8] local dialects are not listed. Groups are in bold, subgroups are numbered ...