Mutual intelligibility

Abstract

Chapter 20 treats the success of the criterion of mutual intelligibility since the 1950s, when American linguists interested in Amerindian tongues started to actively test this feature. Pioneers were Carl Voegelin and Zellig Harris, who suggested four methods for answering language / dialect questions, including mutual intelligibility testing. Even though scholars immediately faced numerous problems, the method enjoyed considerable success and is the primary criterion used by language catalogues such as Ethnologue and Glottolog. The criterion was criticized by, among others, Frederick Agard, who proposed nine postulates for determining language / dialect status. Others followed Morris Swadesh’s lexicostatistic lead and tried to quantify the distances between speech forms. According to one of the most recent representatives of this strand, linguistic distance is bimodally distributed, and the language / dialect distinction is, by consequence, backed by the majority of the linguistic evidence. Rather artificially, a strict cut-off point is proposed in this recent contribution.