How intelligible are Turkish and Azeri? I know they are close enough, but I wonder if it similar to Scottish English vs. American English or farther, more like Spanish vs. Portuguese?
It is like British and American English.
I can understand 80-90% of Azeri from either directly from words or context of the sentence. Azeri sounds more accented too.
I really don’t know the Scottish English so I’m not sure if its better fit.
I really don’t know the Scottish English
If you think American v. British are at 80-90%, Scottish is around 30% and that’s being generous 🙂
I learned English from mostly American sources and I can barely understand Brit English :) It’s not just words, the accent makes it harder too. I guess I would never understand Scottish one then.
The Turkish/Azeri situation is close to this, at least for me.
For a native speaker British and American English are probably at least 99% intelligible for the main dialects, though there are some regional accents that are less. Scottish is usually mostly intelligible but I’ve heard some Irish ones where I can only catch a few words here and there.
There’s I think a Tom Scott video where he interviewed someone with just the absolute thickest accent in a little Irish village, and he needed a translator from the village to mediate.
The challenge with Scottish English is mostly just about learning how they modify their pronunciation of English. Without having it explained to me, I was able to go from not understanding Limmy’s Show, to understanding nearly all of it, simply by watching a lot of episodes and getting used to his accent.
Id say its a bit more, I need azeri speakers to speak slowly there are quite some terms that I need to take an educated guess at. (para=pul for instance)
Maybe you’re right 🤔 The Azeri people I interacted had very clear accent than the average. So I guess we can lower the assumption to %70? 🙂
70% is fair think when theyre talking to me, but if theyre talking with eachother it drops dramatically lol.
scottish english might be a good analogy. If they talk to someone who only knows plain english they will take that into account, but amongst eachother youd be lucky to get the general gist of the topic at hand.
I don’t know about your actual question, just wanted to point out that Spanish and Portuguese are very close, you might want to use a different example, like Spanish and Italian or French, which are somewhat similar but different enough. For a Spanish speaker to understand Portuguese (and vice-versa) all you need is to ask the other person to speak slowly for you to have time to process it, but they’re almost entirely understandable.
Source: I’m an Argentinian (Spanish speaking country) that went to live on Brazil (Portuguese speaking country). I speak both languages fluently today, but even the first time I heard Portuguese I could understand 99% of what was said.
This is a really good question that I’ve never thought about before
I don’t know who Azeri is, but I find Turkish perfectly intelligible. By the way, wanna know why you should be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm?
😰bricktop
Sugar?
No thank you, Turkish. I’m sweet enough.
I don’t mean to be argumentative, but I want to genuinely understand your comparison: Scottish English and American English are the exact same language (sure there are differences that can be assimilated to regionalisms), but Spanish and Portuguese are two different languages (they come from the same root ane grammar is similar, but not the same, the vocabulary is generally different (though similar sounding)).
When you compare Scottish English and American English, I tend to see a relationship more similar to Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese from Portugal.
Cheers, mate!
The question is asking where along the spectrum of divergence these dialects are, so picking examples that don’t have the same level of similarity is the whole point. Different accents within English are on one side of the spectrum (quite similar, mutually intelligible) and Spanish and Portuguese are on the other end, basically completely separate language though people may still be able to communicate with some effort due to cognates and similar grammar.
Thanks! I actually misread the last line by OP (sorry, I read it before going to bed!).
The comparison makes sense now
Whether or not something is a dialect or an accent or a different language entirely is a sometimes poorly defined thing, often muddled by politics or history but also by asymmetric or incomplete intelligibility.
Surely at least most would say Scottish English is a dialect of the same language spoken throughout the rest of Britain and the world, but I would caution saying things like “the exact same language”. Look at “Yugoslavian” or Serbian and Croatian for some other languages that are probably as similar and closely related as Scottish and American English, but are nonetheless considered separate languages by native speakers because it helps them to establish or enforce distinct cultural identities.
They’re not wrong in this case though, Scottish English is the dialect of English spoken in Scotland and the separate Anglic language is known as Scots. The line between the two can be blurry in places, but the terms do specifically refer to the dialect and language respectively.
Not to be confused with Scots Gaelic, an entirely separate Goidelic language spoken in parts of Scotland.
I’m aware, but even there the line between Scots and Scottish English is a pretty blurry distinction. It almost means “Scottish where I can only usually figure out what word that was” more than anything. Serbian and Croatian from my example are even closer than that, very much like Scottish and British or American English, with the main distinction that separates them being just whether it’s written with Latin letters or Cyrillic.
It’s a bit like if there was no Scots language, and the people in Scotland just still used runes to write but spoke the same language, except with even more old animosity fueled by previous governments.
I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make. You’re objectively wrong about “Scottish where I can only usually figure out what word that was”, and the most obvious point against that is that people living here regularly code-switch between Scots and Scottish English and understand both.
The phrase “naw A’m urnae” is undoubtedly Scots and wouldn’t make grammatical sense in a word-for-word English translation (“no I’m aren’t” or “no I’m are not”), the phrase “dialects used outwith Scotland” is clearly Scottish English. These are very distinctly different, the blurriness I mentioned before is simply from the fact most people speaking Scots also speak Scottish English and code-switch. The fact you seem to be unable to place the line does not mean one does not exist. That’s like claiming blue and green are the same because you can’t identify the exact crossover where blue becomes green.
Scottish English is the dialect of English spoken in Scotland. Scots is a distinct Anglic language which evolved in Scotland. Being unable to draw the line between them does not make them the same thing, and being able to figure out what a word is definitely doesn’t change what language it’s part of.
The point I was trying to make was just that linguistic distance doesn’t necessarily correlate with whether two things are considered distinct languages or merely dialects. There are languages less distinct from each other than Scottish and American English that are considered separate languages, and there are languages more distinct that Scots and English that are considered one language. “It’s the exact same language” isn’t always a useful ruler.
When I said
It’s a bit like if there was no Scots language, and the people in Scotland just still used runes to write but spoke the same language, except with even more old animosity fueled by previous governments.
I was referring to the state of serbo-croatian being similar to that imaginary situation. I understand that Scots is quite different from English, I wasn’t trying to erase the line between them, just to clarify that the amount of difference isn’t as straightforward as it sometimes seems.
Scottish English and American English are the exact same language
