Dialect or a New Language: A Possible Explanation of the 70% Mutual Intelligibility Threshold

Authors

Olga Kosheleva, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

12-2013

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-13-73

Published in International Mathematical Forum, 2014, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 189-192.

Abstract

In most cases, linguists have a consensus on when people from different regions speak two different dialects of the same language (and can, thus, understand each other reasonably well) or two different languages (in this case, their mutual intelligibility is limited). In most cases, this intuitive consensus corresponds to a 70% mutual intelligibility threshold: if at least 70% of the words from one region are understandable to people from another region, then these are two dialects, otherwise these are two different languages. In this paper, we provide a possible explanation for this 70% threshold.