Mutual Intelligibility Research Articles

Chicahuaxtla Triqui

Chicahuaxtla Triqui [i.kaˈwaks.a ˈtɾi.ki] or Nânj ǹï'ïn [nã4hnɯ1ʔɯ3] ‘the complete language’, as named by the Triqui people, is one of three languages in the Triqui subfamily of the Mixtecan family. The Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI 2014; http://www.inali.gob.mx/clin-inali/) lists two other Triqui languages with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility for speakers of Chicahuaxtla Triqui (Casad 1974: 79) – the first is spoken in San Martín Itunyoso and the other in San Juan Copala.

An Evaluation of Intelligibility Debate in Pakistan

The English language came to the subcontinent through the British who ruled it for more than 100 years in the 17th century. Now the people of Pakistan and India are sandwiched between a more formal, sophisticated and literal English Language of the British and informal and casual English Language of the Americans. English is a lingua Franca which is acknowledged as a store house of knowledge and window onto world. At the start of the 21st century, most applied linguists were familiar with the fact that English is now spoken by a considerably greater number of non-native speakers than the native speakers. This incipient change in the status of English as an International language has opened a new vista of debate, namely, the intelligibility debate. It is assumed that English as an International Language has attained such a niche that its ownership by some group or some nation cannot be accepted as an authority, as it is connecting people across the globe through its mutual intelligibility trait. Those who can use it proficiently and even have command over its idiomatic use, whatever accent they may have must be acknowledged. The idea of following RP has been challenged by linguists like Jennifer Jenkins, Barbra Sieldhofer, Jonna Przedlacka, Katerzyna, etc and defended by Peter Trudgill and others of his school insist on the importance of a standard accent to be followed. This school says that every language has its own peculiar patterns which should be maintained while acquiring it otherwise that particular language will lose its peculiar flavor and identity and would gradually be lost like many other languages which could not resist simplification campaigns and eventually lost their originality. The current study explores this issue in Pakistani academic and professional situation among Pakistani Language practitioners with a survey based on the views of students and teachers through a questionnaire. The results show that all groups are in favor of an eclectic approach as is approved by Jenkins in her LFC proposal to NNS of English worldwide to facilitate convenience and ease. This study will initiate debates about an alternative way to teach and learn English as lingua franca.

The use of English as a lingua franca in translation

In translation, not only two languages but two cultures come into contact which means that translators must consider <em>who </em>wrote the text, <em>when</em>, <em>why</em>, <em>for whom </em>and <em>who </em>is now reading it and for <em>what </em>purpose. In the wake of rapid technological advances and the need to spread information quickly and efficiently, translation has grown in importance in the globalized world. So has its reliance on English in its role as a global lingua franca. English is often being used for ‘interculturalizing’ native languages but it is also true that English texts are written by speakers who use English as a lingua franca (ELF) with the additional consequence of local languages being incorporated into the texts. This is the linguistic hybridity used in constructing a wider view of the world. However, the prime aim of any lingua franca communication is mutual intelligibility. Saussure wrote about the contrasting principles of <em>provincialism </em>(ésprit de clocher) and what he termed <em>intercourse: </em>the need for broader communication. We can see Saussure’s principles as two imperatives: the <em>cooperative </em>and <em>territorial imperatives. </em>That is to say that language change is brought about by the ‘cooperative imperative’ as we need to continually modify our language in order to communicate with other people. At the same time, there is the ‘territorial imperative’ to secure and protect our own space and sustain our separate social and individual identity. In this study, the translation of linguistic units can only be understood when considered together with the cultural contexts in which they arise, and in which they are used. Blogging in Singapore and the Philippines is part of the ‘cooperative and territorial imperatives’ where the use of English as a lingua franca is intertwined with translanguaging.

“BARREN DESARTS OF ARBITRARY WORDS”: LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION IN COLLIER AND FIELDING'S THE CRY

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the problems of language and communication in Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding's experimental The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754). Throughout Collier and Fielding's work the efficacy of language as a communicative tool is interrogated, as their protagonists pursue clarity of understanding against a backdrop of hostile misinterpretation and imperceptive abuse of words. The Cry’s hybrid of social commentary and narrative anatomizes instances of semantic and conceptual confusion, exemplifying the ways in which “arbitrary words”, “perverse interpretations” and lack of linguistic care are not merely individual failings, but offences against the community. The author argues that this collaborative work participates in contemporary debates about language and the possibilities of mutual intelligibility in the wake of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Reading The Cry alongside James Harris's Hermes: or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (1751), the author shows how both works celebrate the power of abstraction and the idealizing abilities of the mind against what they perceive as the reductive materialism of Locke. The Cry concludes with a peculiarly unsatisfying instance of intersubjectivity. This essay argues that The Cry’s ostensibly utopian conclusion is profoundly compromised by its authors' scepticism about communication between the sexes. Reading The Cry in light of its inquiry into language enables a re-evaluation of its failed romance narrative and helps account for the deliberately unsatisfying terms of its ending.

Mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic functionally tested: A pilot study

AbstractThis paper presents the results of a project designed to functionally test the mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Tunisian Arabic, and Benghazi Libyan Arabic. We compiled an audio-based intelligibility test consisting of three components: a word test where the respondents were asked to perform a semantic classification task with 11 semantic categories, a sentence test where the task was to provide a translation of a sentence into the respondent’s native language, and a text test where a short text was listened to twice and the respondents were asked to answer 8 multiple-choice questions. Data were collected from 24 respondents in Malta, Tunis, and Benghazi. It was found that there exists asymmetric mutual intelligibility between the two mainstream varieties of Maġribī Arabic and Maltese, with speakers of Tunisian and Libyan Arabic able to understand about 40 % of what is being said to them in Maltese, against about 30 % for speakers of Maltese exposed to either variety of Arabic. Additionally, it was found that Tunisian Arabic has the highest level of mutual intelligibility with either of the other two varieties. Combining the intelligibility scores with comparative linguistic data, we were able to sketch out the phonological variables involved in enabling and inhibiting mutual intelligibility for all three varieties of Arabic and set the stage for further research into the subject.

Magɨ: An Undocumented Language of Papua New Guinea

In this paper I introduce Magɨ, a previously undocumented speech variety of central Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. Magɨ is closely related to the Aisi language; however, I argue that it should not be considered an Aisi dialect but rather a separate language. I present arguments from various domains in support of this position, including lexicon, phonology, morphology, syntax, historical change, mutual intelligibility, and language attitudes. The facts provided as evidence for these arguments also double as an outline of Magɨ structure, and I conclude that Magɨ is a separate language. The first appendix contains Magɨ and Aisi wordlists, and the second contains a short Magɨ text.

The Linguistic Vitality of American Indian Sign Language: Endangered, yet Not Vanished

This article examines the linguistic status and potential for revitalization of American Indian Sign Language (AISL), which is considered an endangered language variety. It reports recent findings from the first documentary linguistics fieldwork carried out in over fifty years to focus on the AISL variety, which has been learned and used as a primary or secondary language among members of some American Indian communities since the eighteenth century and possibly earlier. AISL has been maintained over the past several generations chiefly by tribal elders and these efforts have been buoyed by deaf tribal members who have acquired it as a fluent means of communication within their own native communities. While research continues to identify different AISL dialects and the number of remaining native signers, reportedly hundreds of North American Indians still use and understand AISL to varying degrees of proficiency and mutual intelligibility. The AISL variety has been transmitted for many generations and used internationally among dozens of American Indian nations of the United States and Canada; today, representing mainly Algonquian and Siouan language families. Up to now, both deaf and hearing tribal members have served a vital role in the development and transmission of indigenous sign language. Hence, it has been well documented that American indigenous sign language served a wide variety of discourse functions and purposes—ranging from in-group (shared within a single tribe or family) to international communication (shared between different Indian tribes and nations). The article also highlights how documentary linguistics contributes to language preservation and revitalization.

Intelligibility and Segmental Phoneme Repair Strategies in English-as-a-Lingua-Franca Interactions among Chinese and Japanese Speakers of English

AbstractThis is a qualitative study of the types of segmental repair that maintain mutual intelligibility in English-as-a-Lingua-Franca interactions among Chinese and Japanese speakers of English (

Variazioni e negoziazioni di significato attraverso l’inglese ‘lingua franca’ in contesti migratori

Abstract – ELF used in immigration domains typically reflects the different cognitive and communicative processes as well as the power/status asymmetries involved in cross-cultural situations of unequal encounters between non-western supplicants (i.e., African immigrants and asylum seekers) and western (Italian) experts in authority. Such situations will be here explored with reference to institutional contexts where the conditions for achieving successful communication through the use of ELF variations are biased against the participants’ different native linguacultural backgrounds from which they appropriate English without conforming to native speaker norms of usage. A number of case studies will illustrate the extent to which features of ELF usages may be perceived as formally deviating and socio-pragmatically inappropriate in intercultural communication – this being due to the participants’ lack of acknowledgement of each other’s ELF variations – thus giving rise to misunderstandings that often raise social and ethical issues about inequality and social justice. More specifically, the case studies will enquire, on the one hand, into the processes by which ELF users transfer typological, textual, lexical and logical features of their native languages and cultures to the domain-specific communication they are involved in, thus affecting their pragmalinguistic behaviours and interpretative strategies, leading ultimately to communication failure. On the other hand, some case studies will enquire into possible ‘hybridization strategies’ of written reformulation aimed at making ELF discourse conceptually accessible and socio-pragmatically acceptable to immigrants and refugees involved in the interaction, by making it conform to their different native linguacultural backgrounds, with the ultimate purpose of achieving a ‘mutual accommodation’ of ELF variations in order to promote the social inclusion of marginalized immigrants as well as raise awareness among intercultural mediators operating in such situations of power asymmetry of the possible discourse strategies that can improve mutual intelligibility through ELF.

마을만들기 시범사업의 추진체계와 참여자 역할 분석

Community-Design is the movement and the project which enhances residence area, mainly by themselves. The project improves the feature of life by upgrading the living environment, not only physically reformed, but also continuously cared by residents, and experts. However, in the process of the project which accompanies a number of and groups, some problems are exposed; conflicts of opinions and confusion between each part of roles are caused, so sometimes the plan goes off on a tangent or communities are broken up. Thus, this study draw the exemplary promotion system and the roles of participants from some cases in the demonstration projects. The goal of this study is to suggest a standard model for applying to the future business of Community-Design by verifying the suggested system. The scope of this study covers DaeHak-Dong in Ansan case and urban residence and commerce area case among Making the Livable City; a representative sample of the domestic business of Community Design. The standard promotion system is divided into led by administration and led by residents. This study tests propriety from the cases of led by residents based on the aim of Community Design. In the process of the project, should try to play a leading role, and and expert should play a directly supporting role. Participants should maintain governance through lateral relationship with mutual intelligibility, and aim to have a complementary role with the proper participate time on each phase.

A semiotic perspective on webconferencing-supported language teaching

AbstractIn webconferencing-supported teaching, the webcam mediates and organizes the pedagogical interaction. Previous research has provided a mixed picture of the use of the webcam: while it is seen as a useful medium to contribute to the personalization of the interlocutors’ relationship, help regulate interaction and facilitate learner comprehension and involvement, the limited access to visual cues provided by the webcam is felt to be useless or even disruptive.This study examines the meaning-making potential of the webcam in pedagogical interactions from a semiotic perspective by exploring how trainee teachers use the affordances of the webcam to produce non-verbal cues that may be useful for mutual comprehension. The research context is a telecollaborative project where trainee teachers of French as a foreign language (FFL) met for online sessions in French with undergraduate Business students at an Irish university. Using multimodal transcriptions of the interaction data from these sessions, screen shot data, and students’ post-course interviews, it was found, firstly, that while a head and shoulders framing shot was favoured by the trainee teachers, there does not appear to be an optimal framing choice for desktop videoconferencing among the three framing types identified. Secondly, there was a loss between the number of gestures performed by the trainee teachers and those that were visible for the students. Thirdly, when trainee teachers were able to coordinate the audio and kinesic modalities, communicative gestures that were framed, and held long enough to be perceived by the learners, were more likely to be valuable for mutual comprehension.The study highlights the need for trainee teachers to develop critical semiotic awareness to gain a better perception of the image they project of themselves in order to actualise the potential of the webcam and add more relief to their online teacher presence.

Implementing a Global Englishes component in a university English course in Hong Kong

With the global spread of English and the emergence of different varieties of English around the world, World Englishes (WE) researchers have argued for the recognition of ‘Englishes’ in the plural and called for the need to acknowledge the diversity of English (Kachru, 1985, 1997). Apart from WE researchers who are interested in investigating nation-bound varieties of English in different parts of the world, a growing number of researchers have begun to examine the phenomenon of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication, given the growth of intercultural exchanges worldwide (Jenkins, 2000, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011). Whilst WE researchers are primarily concerned with how varieties of English differ from each other, ELF researchers are interested in exploring how speakers of different Englishes communicate with each other in contexts where English is the common language. For example, these ELF researchers have studied the communicative and pragmatic strategies which people from different lingua-cultural backgrounds use to communicate with one another through English as a common resource in order to achieve mutual intelligibility (Seidlhofer, 2011). Despite their different focuses, both WE and ELF researchers deal with the same global phenomenon of English use and the pluricentricity of English, and share similar ideas about the ownership of English, and language contact and change (Seidlhofer, 2011). A relatively new field, Global Englishes (GE) (Galloway & Rose, 2013, 2014; Jenkins, 2014), has thus emerged to bring together researchers from both WE and ELF. With an inclusive orientation, GE places less emphasis on native speaker English, emphasizes the diversity of English, and questions the relevance of native speaker norms for English Language Teaching (ELT) (see Galloway & Rose, 2015).

Do Signers Understand Regional Varieties of a Sign Language? A Lexical Recognition Experiment.

The degree of mutual intelligibility of British Sign Language (BSL) regional varieties has been a subject of some debate. Recent research in which dyads of signers from contrasting regional backgrounds engaged in a conversational task showed no problems understanding one another. The present study investigated signers' knowledge of different BSL regional varieties. Twenty-five participants from Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, and Newcastle took part in a computer-based lexical recognition task in which they had to identify the meaning of 47 color signs from various regions in the United Kingdom. The results indicate that overall signers have a poor knowledge of regional signs for colors when signs are presented in isolation and without mouthing. Furthermore, signers with deaf parents performed better in the recognition task than signers with hearing parents and varieties from London and Birmingham were easiest to recognize. This article discusses how signers cope with regional differences and considers the features that facilitate in the recognition of regional varieties in BSL.

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility between three West Slavic (Czech, Slovak and Polish) and three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Slovene and Bulgarian). Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. The results show that in most cases, a division between West and South Slavic languages does exist and that West Slavic languages are more intelligible among speakers of West Slavic languages than among those of South Slavic languages. We found an asymmetry in Croatian-Slovene intelligibility, whereby Slovene speakers can understand written and spoken Croatian better than vice versa. Finally, we compared the three methods and found that the word translation task and the cloze test give very similar results, while the results of the picture task are somewhat unreliable.

The Mutual Intelligibility of Cameroon English and Indian English Speakers

This study investigates the mutual intelligibility of Cameroon English and Indian English speakers. From the data collected in oral reading on various aspects of English and in free speech by Cameroon English speakers and Indian English speakers, the analysis is done from the New Englishes and Contrastive Analysis frame. The findings show that, contrary to the presupposed mutual intelligibility of native English speech on the one hand, and the mutual intelligibility of non-native English speech on the other, some non-native speakers of English face almost the same difficulty understanding other non-native speakers like the native speakers. Though many new Englishes share a number of common features that differentiate them from native Englishes, each variety of non-native English has some features which prevent it from being fully understood by both native speakers and speakers of other non-native varieties of English.

Ethnologue 16/17/18th editions: A comprehensive review

Ethnologue ( http://www.ethnologue.com ) is the most widely consulted inventory of the world’s languages used today. The present review article looks carefully at the goals and description of the content of the Ethnologue ’s 16th, 17th, and 18th editions, and reports on a comprehensive survey of the accuracy of the inventory itself. While hundreds of spurious and missing languages can be documented for Ethnologue , it is at present still better than any other nonderivative work of the same scope, in all aspects but one. Ethnologue fails to disclose the sources for the information presented, at odds with well-established scientific principles. The classification of languages into families in Ethnologue is also evaluated, and found to be far off from that argued in the specialist literature on the classification of individual languages. Ethnologue is frequently held to be splitting: that is, it tends to recognize more languages than an application of the criterion of mutual intelligibility would yield. By means of a random sample, we find that, indeed, with confidence intervals, the number of mutually unintelligible languages is on average 85% of the number found in Ethnologue .

Methods of Mutual Comprehension among Various Languages

Abstract The theme of all international congresses of semiotics is “the bridge of various civilizations” and the key problem discussed in the congresses is metalanguage. However, the international problem of international language barriers has not been solved. Based on artificial intelligence, computer science, linguistics, semiotics, and system engineering, this article puts forward the Interlanguage Protocol (ILP) (standard), a global translation network (system and instrument) based on human/machine consensus language and the platform (applied) for global semantic communication and cooperative work, and constitutes Interlanguage system (ILS). Studies show that it is possible for people of different languages to communicate with each other. The Interlanguage system (ILS) may be a bridge of communication between languages (semantic transmission) with no barrier and a method for the problem of metalanguage.

Segmental repair and interactional intelligibility: The relationship between consonant deletion, consonant insertion, and pronunciation intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca in Japan

This is a qualitative study of the relationship between consonant deletion, consonant insertion, and the pragmatic strategies that maintain mutual intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca (hereafter, ELF) interactions among university and exchange students at a Japanese university (Jenkins, 2000; Matsumoto, 2011; O’Neal, 2015). Some ELF research claims that consonant deletion attenuates mutual intelligibility in ELF interactions, especially if the consonant deletion occurs in word-initial and word-medial consonant clusters or in consonant clusters in syllable onsets and codas (Jenkins, 2000, 2007; Deterding, 2013). This study assesses the effect of consonant deletion and consonant insertion on the mutual intelligibility of pronunciation in ELF interactions in Japan. Using conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of miscommunications among ELF speakers at a Japanese university, within which miscommunications are defined as repair sequences, this study claims that consonant deletion can attenuate mutual intelligibility, and that the insertion of a deleted consonant into a word can help restore mutual intelligibility. Furthermore, this is true regardless of deviance from or approximation to a native speaker pronunciation standard. This study concludes that segmental repair is an effective strategy with which English speakers can maintain mutual intelligibility.

Language, Catechisms, and Mesoamerican Lords in Highland Guatemala: Addressing “God” After the Spanish Conquest

The textual sources of indigenous Christianities in Guatemala embody a complex articulation of native thought, European language ideologies, and the diachronic development of the Christianization of different areas of Mesoamerica. The evangelization of the K'iche' became a model for the construction of pastoral Q'eqchi'. In contrast, the evangelization of the Pipil demanded substantial modifications of Mexican Nahuatl doctrinal language. Mutual intelligibility was not the only requisite to persuade and convert the natives. The local organization of speech genres and the indexical associations they effected were equally crucial. Spanish imperial designs, including Christianization, were global, but the texts that mediated them were woven with local threads. The creation of Christian registers in indigenous languages in Guatemala illustrates the confluence of coercion, resistance, and creativity behind the emergence of colonial indigenous religions.

Competing Archives, Competing Histories: French and Its Cultural Locations in Late-Medieval England

Apart from Latin, French was Britain and England's only medieval supraregional language: English remained a regional language of the British Isles until well into the early modern period, with, for example, almost no translations of major English-language works until then. Although insular French differed over time from the various Frenches of Continental regions, French retained a high degree of mutual intelligibility throughout Europe and on both sides of the Channel, and exchanges between England and Continental regions in both directions continued throughout the Middle Ages. The importance of England as the location of the earliest French-language literary culture early in the twelfth century is now widely recognized, and England's influence on the development of French-language literary writing in Europe becoming more so: interchange, exchange, and mutual influence continued in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, though in shifting proportions. French also remained indispensable to external contacts in medieval Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond, and to careers in public administration; used in various professions and occupations (marine, mercantile, legal, for instance); and an important language of literary and documentary composition. Even if we were to discount the Frenches of other British and European regions circulating in England, there were some 950 French literary texts composed there from the early twelfth to the earlier fifteenth centuries. These are joined by an increasing use of French in governance, administration, record keeping, and particular professions and occupations, especially from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. French expanded its domains and range of users in later medieval England: indeed, when “nonliterary” French is considered, the bulk of French writing belongs to the later thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Even in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Ardis Butterfield has shown, the number of books printed in English in England is small compared with those printed in French. It is clear that French of various kinds was used by relatively large numbers of people in medieval England. Not all French users were fully bilingual in French and English, but the range of people involved in the production of various kinds of written and oral French(es) in England embraces a wider class spectrum than the capacity of French to function as an elite language suggests.