Linked Questions
16 questions linked to/from Is there a list of mutually intelligible languages?
36
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5
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How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
How similar are the Ukrainian and Russian languages? For example, can I reasonably expect that anybody from Ukraine would be able to understand spoken Russian or be able to read a Russian text?
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26
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4
answers
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Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance?
I came upon an excellent graphical representation of the linguistic distance between a number of European languages. I'm looking for a similar worldwide map of currently spoken languages. Or at least ...
- 848
8
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4
answers
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Are different varieties of German closer to each other than different Slav languages?
Are different varieties of German (e.g. Bavarian and Low German) closer to each other than different Slav languages (e.g. Russian and Polish)?
The lexical distance map from https://elms.wordpress.com/...
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4
votes
4
answers
858
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Are the orthographies of the Slavic languages generally consistent?
I need to learn two Slavic languages, any two initially, and eventually at least one each from the East, West, and South Slav groups. I understand that each language has its own version of the ...
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17
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2
answers
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How can mutual intelligibility be measured?
What ways do we have of measure the mutual intelligibility of two given languages?
It's easy enough to realise if there is a degree of mutual intelligibility between your own language variety and ...
- 2,039
8
votes
2
answers
356
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Can Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian be considered linguistically distinct?
I grew up the in the former Yugoslavia, and the language I studied in school was called Serbocroatian, which was spoken in four out of the six republics of the union. When the country fell apart, the ...
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7
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3
answers
806
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What is the difference between "Linguistic distance" and "Lexical distance"?
The question arose in the comments here.
- 848
5
votes
1
answer
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What quantity-level of mutual intelligible words are needed for claiming dialects to be languages?
There are much debate of when two dialects become languages. Apart from non-linguistic reasons like politics, quality of understanding is most often used to decide whether two dialects are effectively ...
- 651
1
vote
1
answer
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How similar are Norwegian and Swedish compared to Dutch and Flemish / German?
I speak Dutch natively and wondered this ever since I visited Norway. When I was there a new friend told me Norwegians understand Swedish up to a level and he could not explain how much of it. So I ...
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0
votes
1
answer
716
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How close is Ancient Greek to English or French or Spanish?
I.e.: What are the Linguistic Distances of Ancient Greek compared to 2000s English, French, and Spanish?
I know that each Indo-European language belongs to its own Language Family: Ancient Greek to ...
user5306
8
votes
1
answer
330
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What measures are there of similarity between languages? And where can I find data on such measurements?
Perhaps the most natural measure of similarity between two close languages is the ease with which a native speaker of one can understand the other. (This might not be symmetrical in some cases, ...
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8
votes
1
answer
638
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Is there a measure for grammatical similarity?
Something I see from time to time is the proportion of words from various sources, e.g. English has about 29% French, 29% Latin, 26% Germanic and 6% Greek words. I've never seen anything similar with ...
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4
votes
0
answers
442
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Measuring lexical similarity between two arbitrary languages
Pardon me if this question is naive, but I am wondering if there is a way to quantify lexical similarity between two corpora of text, each written in different languages whose alphabets differ greatly....
1
vote
1
answer
114
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What's the difference between separated languages and a separated dialects? [duplicate]
In the context of international languages, i've seen multiple instances of languages that are mutually intelligible but are considered different languages:
Serbian and Croatian
Luxembourgish and High ...
2
votes
0
answers
124
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Relative Language Distances [closed]
Could someone compare the distance between Modern French and Middle French to Modern English and Middle English. In general which of these languages has diverged more over time?
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