If you and I both speak the same language, we can communicate. If we don't, we can't.
Right?
Except consider this documentary where they interviewed someone in the Sea Islands off
Georgia. He says ever since radio and TV came to town, our way of speaking just became more
and more American. Now we sound like them, they sound like us. Just one problem: this
interview has subtitles because America, this Gullah speaker understands you perfectly,
but it's not so easy to go the other way.
See, sometimes when languages come together they create this really odd situation, where
it's easy enough for one person to communicate one way but it's much harder in reverse.
Today I want to get animated about that. Including one time I noticed it myself and, even better,
three countries full of people where this kind of asymmetric intelligibility is normal.
Do I finally get to use this one? I've been sitting on it for a year. It felt like such
a NativLang moment. So I'm in the store, standing in line with a handbasket full of what my
friend Javier calls my rabbit food. I'm agonizing over whether or not to put back the nuts.
They were on the pricey side for what you're paying me these days. Enter a fashionable
woman. She glides over to the fancy tea-juice-potion section, the one that's for the $8+ crowd,
not the 5.99 uh that's a little pricey for nuts crowd.
Seconds later, I swear out of nowhere - phwooh - one of the employees is right next to her
unboxing stuff. I hear the eagerness in his voice when he asks, "you need help finding
anything?" She turns and sounds come out of her mouth but no words. Wait, no. She's speaking
Italian! Our selfless helper doesn't flinch. He switches from English on the spot. No momentum
lost. The two exchange a bit of banter, he shows her down an aisle and their voices fade
into the store.
There's something I forgot to mention though, and it's why the moment stuck with me. When
the employee switched, he spoke Spanish... y español con acento caribeño, which I find
quite lovely. Two languages were crossing paths but in a lopsided way. He was clearly
having an easier time helping her than the other way around.
Why? Well, we could come up with reasons. He's eager to help. Maybe he's heard Italian
before. Maybe he's used to juggling languages. In short, motive and opportunity. But one
more factor can come into play in situations like this: the languages themselves.
To see how, let's visit a place where this kind of communication happens every day. This
frozen-looking area at the top of Europe is home to a bunch of languages plus a ton of
dialects, but focus on the Scandinavian "North Germanic" languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish.
For most of us, understanding another language takes study and time. But Scandinavians are
lucky. Their languages are close enough that they can go next door and mostly communicate,
semi-communication style! It's like a triangle. A beautiful triangle of understanding. This
is mutual intelligibility, and it is glorious.
But the triangle isn't evenly balanced. I hear it's much harder to semicommunicate in
Swedish and Danish than it is in Swedish and Norwegian.
And it gets even more unequal in each pair. If you're Danish, Swedish is easier for you
than if you're a Swede hearing Danish. So unfair! It's "asymmetric intelligibility".
Wow, that's a lot of syllables.
We could try to boil this down to, like I said before, motive and opportunity. But what
if it's not the people but the languages themselves that are creating Scandinavia's asymmetry?
How could we tell? Well, the languages are close enough that their grammar and, mostly,
vocabulary don't change much from tongue to tongue. The big difference is in how they
get pronounced. So here how a Swede says Copenhagen: Köpenhamn. Now here's a Dane: København.
Smart people decided to measure this difference with the Levenshtein distance. I'm not your
math teacher or your math channel, but here's the function if you really want to play with it,
in its recursive glory. I'll honestly be doing the same, so we can nerd together. Solidarity.
The results estimate what it takes to transform one word into another, so how far apart cognates
should sound. Danish cognates should be more distant from Swedish than the way Norwegians
say them. Swedish and Danish should be extremes, and Norwegian should settle down
right in the middle.
One of those authors teamed up for another study hoping to do even better using entropy.
Again, not your math teacher here. That's my mom's job, and she rocks at it. Basically,
model the uncertainty Scandinavians feel when they're semicommunicating
and guessing at sounds.
An example. Danish grammatical endings can only have one vowel in them. But their Swedish
cognates can have three. This creates uncertainty for Swedes listening to Danish. So, using
conditional entropy, just how uncertain is Swedish given Danish? How intelligible is
that intelligibility?
Calculating with a bunch of cognates, it looks like Danish to Swedish should be more complicated,
higher conditional entropy, than Swedish to Danish. Swedish and Norwegian are lower, but
we expect more of a challenge going from Norwegian to Swedish than the other way. Denmark should
understand Norway better than vice versa. Really, Danes should get everyone better than
they get the Danes.
Danish does have a reputation for being the tricky one. We could do a whole animated tangent
on Danish's very evolved sounds, but, here, one more time: kʰøb̥m̩ˈhɑʊ̯ˀn.
Enough said.
So now we have numbers guessing what intelligibility should be. What happens if we invite real
speakers in for a real test? Ask Scandinavians who use one of the languages at home to listen
to a reading in another language, then quiz them. How well did they understand? Did high
entropy predict low intelligibility?
Let's see. Danes have an easier time understanding Swedes than vice versa. Check! Norwegians
and Swedes understand each other better. Perfect! Except, wait... why are Norwegian speakers
having such an easy time with Danish? I'm reading that right? Yeah. Danish should be
hard for Norwegians, but these results makes it look like Norwegians understand everything
better than everyone.
Hhh, why? Well, researchers speculate. I'll have to leave it a mystery this time, but
the reasons probably bring us back to motive and opportunity.
These three factors make asymmetric intelligibility happen not just in Scandinavia but around
the world. Written Estonian looks more like Finnish to Finns than written Finnish does
to Estonians. Lao and Thai are close, but you Lao speakers out there have a leg up,
possibly thanks to Thai soap operas and magazines. Jamaican Patwah speakers understand English,
but the reverse is notoriously vexing. And my amazing patrons pointed out Québec French
for Parisians, Romanian for Italians and Spanish for many kids in the US.
So the next time you can't understand someone who understands you, it might be because they're
motivated. Maybe they want to help a well-dressed Italian. It could be exposure: they've met
your words before, like Gullah. But, most intriguing of all, it may be because something
about your language tilts the odds in their favor.
Just because you don't understand someone, it's no guarantee they can't understand you.
Thanks to my patrons for voting for this and for keeping the channel's heart beating and
tongue talking. Oh, let me know if you have any asymmetric intelligibility stories of
your own. I'm collecting any good ones. And stick around and subscribe for language.