Analysis Of Mutual Intelligibility Between Spanish And Portuguese Speakers
Europe portrays the complete version of multilingualism environment within a large number of indigenous languages which approximately represents 91% but, with respect to all dialects and accents in Europe, only 24 languages from the total are considered as official according to the European Union, these languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Between 2007 and 2009 the European commissioner responsible for multilingualism Leonard Orban stated that despite multilingualism is the tool to build the bridge between people and linguistic diversity, linguistic problems in communication appear and the only way to come over it is the sufficient knowledge about language.
Haugen (1966), coined the term ‘semi-communication’ in conversations where speakers of closely related languages communicate using only their respective native language. He was one of the first to conduct a study about the mutual intelligibility of closely related Scandinavian languages. Focusing on Danish, Swedish and Norwegian languages which are in general so close to each other and speakers of these languages can communicate each by using their own language without prior language instruction. Braunmüller & Zeevaert (2001), referred to that phenomenon as ‘receptive multilingualism’ or ‘mutual intelligibility’. Also, the term was used the first time by Peter Trudgill in his book Sociolinguistics: An Introduction 1974 in which he clarifies that Mutual intelligibility is the extent to which speakers from two or more speech communities can understand each other. At Wikipedia, it is defined as 'a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort. Sometimes it is used as a criterion to distinguish languages from dialects. Linguistic and nonlinguistic factors play a basic role in mutual intelligibility; Lexicon, Orthography, Pronunciation, Morphology and Syntax are linguistic factors whereas Exposure, Years learned and Attitude are nonlinguistic factors.
According to Charlott Gooskens, Vincent J. van Heuven (2017), if two languages have mutual intelligibility such as Scandinavian group there would be no need to teach the related languages in a school curriculum, or even if there are gaps between them educators can design materials to come over it. The main European languages families tree; Germanic, Slavic and Romance have been under the spot and few language combinations such as Spanish and Portuguese have been studied. In the Romance language family tree, there is a disagreement about the sub-grouping of those languages, but the accepted classification has been done by Hall (1974), who based his classification on phonological criteria. Romania comes from Eastern branch while all the other languages belong to Italo-Western branch. The later branch divides Italo and Western, Italian is the only subdivide language from Italo, whereas Western is subdivided to libero-Romance (Spanish and Portuguese) and Gallo-Romance (French). Generally speaking, Romance speakers can understand Italian easier than French and Romanian which require more efforts. Spanish and Portuguese are very close to each other, to a large extent these two languages are mutually intelligible. Although the relation between these two languages is described as sisters asymmetrically, Portuguese speakers easily understood Spanish than the other way around. In this paper, we will summarize the reasons behind that.
According to Gooskens, these two languages come from the same ancestors so it will be easy for a reader or listener to understand them. The first one who tested test mutual intelligibility between Portuguese and Spanish was Jensen (1989), the results showed the success of the Portuguese speakers than the Spanish at interpreting what they heard. For European Portuguese and Spanish, a similar has been observed informally between them but was never tested experimentally. According to Cressey (1978), Spanish vowel system only has five vowels while Mateus & d’Andrade (2000) clarify that Portuguese has a complicated vowel system with nasalized vowels and a high prevalence of assimilations. Voigt and Schüppert (2013) reveal that in spontaneous conversations Portuguese reduce more syllables and produce fewer, Spanish speakers use less complex syllables than Portuguese speakers do. Charlotte Gooskens, Vincent J. van Heuven, Jelena Golubović, Anja Schüppert, Femke Swarte and Stefanie Voigt (2017) have repeated Jensen’s study as a part of a much larger project under the name of Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe; Germanic, Romance and Slavic Spanish and Portuguese were a part of it and compared with each other. In this paper we will summarize this study, focusing on Spanish and Portuguese and compare it with the previous ones.
Charlotte Gooskens, Vincent J. van Heuven, Jelena Golubović, Anja Schüppert, Femke Swarte and Stefanie Voigt (2016) conducted their study with a large-scale web-based investigation to examine the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe, according to Charlotte Gooskens and Vincent J. van Heuven few studies have been done in this area, to do the web-investigation they used a group of listeners who had learnt or exposed to language tests before and another group of listeners who had had minimal exposure to the test language. Most of the participants were young adult between 18 and 33 years old, they were or had been university students. Participants for further analysis were selected by matching groups according to specific criteria. The selected listeners all came from the same countries where the speakers came from. Note that listeners who had learned the test language for a long time more than the maximum period of the offered duration in secondary school were excluded.
The aim of that experiment is to investigate how well the listeners understand the test language on the basis of structural similarities between their own language and the test languages. To conduct the study researchers developed a cloze test to be carried out via the internet and could be scored automatically using the software. This kind of tests has been used to test the mutual intelligibility by Scharpff and Van Heuven (1988) and Van Bezooijen and Gooskens (2005).
Participants should understand the text to recognize the words or type of words to fill the gap correctly. The number of correctly selected words is the measure of intelligibility. Four English texts at the B1 level, as defined by the CEFRL (Council of Europe, 2001), were modified to length of approximately 200 words each (16 or 17 sentences) and translated in to each of the 16 target languages and recorded by four native female’s speakers aged between 20 and 40 years of each of the 16 test languages. The reason behind using four native females’ speakers’ voices to neutralize the potential influence of voice quality differences on the results. In the experiment, the recording of one text from each speaker was used randomly, each text was divided into twelve units, corresponding to sentences or clauses. The listeners were tested via online application. Before doing the intelligibility tests, each participant filled a questionnaire on language attitudes towards, prior exposure to and familiarity with a number of European languages. They were asked to specify their age, sex, the country where they had grown up, the country they have spent their most life in and how many years and which language they normally heard at home. These data helped to collect extra-linguistic data about the participants. The answers to the questions were used to select listeners with a similar background in order to compare the results of the various listener’s groups. The entire online session lasted approximately 15 min (questionnaire and test together).
The results for Romance Family Tree showed that
a) Romance group mean score is slightly lower than of the Germanic group (36.7%),
b) Romanian, not unexpectedly, is hardest to understand (mean score of all listeners of 12.5%),
c) Romanians are quite successful in understanding the other languages but all other listeners in the same family tree have difficulties with Romanian,
d) Spanish is the language that is easiest to understand for all listener groups (a mean of 57.2% correct answers across all listener groups,
e) The Portuguese listener group has the highest mean score (47.2%) but still Romanians understand the other languages almost as well (44.9% correct),
f) Portuguese listeners understand Spanish better than vice versa,
g) Portuguese is also more difficult for Italian listeners than the other way around.
h) As it was expected the second group (data set) showed higher correlations with the tree distances in the case of the Germanic language family while in Romance language family correlation was not significant. For Slavic, the results showed that the communication situation in the Slavic area is well reflected in the Slavic language family tree.
Back to Jensen (1989), he found the same asymmetry for Portuguese and Spanish, according to Voigt, Schüppert & Gooskens the only disadvantage of Jensen (1989) experiment was that the texts used differed across the languages, which makes the intelligibility results difficult to compare at that time. Yet, the genre (stories for children, news article, etc.) was kept constant throughout the languages. Both languages are closely related in terms of structural features, e.g. simple syllable structure CVC and a common lexis.
European Spanish and Portuguese differ significantly in terms of pronunciation. Phonetically, Portuguese shows more similarity to French or Catalan while Spanish pronunciation is more closely related to Italian pronunciation. They stated that most languages can be categorized as either stress-timed or syllable-timed, Spanish and Portuguese also show differences in timedness. Voigt, Schüppert & Gooskens, showed that speakers of European Portuguese do not speak faster per se but due to vowel elision Portuguese shows more reduction, which might make it less intelligible. Also, they clarified that Portuguese has a much more varied vowel inventory than Spanish make it difficult for Spanish speakers to firstly identify the right sounds in order to secondly identify possible cognates.
To conclude Spanish and Portuguese are related sister languages, despite being different in phonology, grammar, and lexicon. The major difference comes from Portuguese system which includes 14 vowels while only 5 in Spanish. Also, in conversation Portuguese as Voigt, Schüppert & Gooskens clarified they don’t speak faster but they use vowel elision which makes it hard for Spanish to understand them well. In my opinion, educators can solve this problem by designing especial material to teach Portuguese vowels and consonants in Spanish schools and vise verse. Games and language applications can help the new generation to practice to come over these differences.
