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.
The animation was very good