The Sound Segments of MSp and MBP

Abstract

As seen in the Introduction, it is often heard in the academia that native speakers of Portuguese understand a good deal of spoken Spanish, whereas native speakers of Spanish have more difficulty understanding spoken Portuguese. For Portuguese and Spanish, this type of observation makes more sense in an academic environment. Professors and students who are native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese in a university setting are more likely to be the ones who will make the above statement true. It is a linguistic phenomenon known as mutual intelligibility between two typologically closed natural languages. Other languages of the same family may have mutual intelligibility in which one of them is more easily understood than the other. However, if one tries to find mutual intelligibity between speakers of Portuguese and Spanish in rural areas Portugal, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Bolivia, Andalucía, to mention some, or among low-, or mid-social classes, without a college background, then it may not work. In general, the spoken languages should be expected to be harder to understand than the written languages.