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REMU

Project
01.01.2010 - 31.12.2030
School of Humanities, Philosophical Faculty
Information People

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Receptive multilingualism: Mutual intelligibility of closely related languages

Language comprehension begins with perceiving similarities between the new and a previously learned language. Closely related languages have the most of these similarities and in a form that is the easiest to perceive. There is, however, no clear understanding of how the similarities between closely related languages are utilized in and which factors effect the process of comprehension. The research project examines which elements listeners and readers pay attention to when trying to understand a text in a closely related language that is new to them. The target languages are Finnish and Estonian and the native languages of the participants, respectively, Estonian and Finnish.

When the target languages are closely related, one possible level of language comprehension is receptive multilingualism. In its most interactive form this means a situation where every conversation participant can use their own native tongue and be understood by the others. We investigate the preexisting conditions for mutual understanding between Finnish and Estonian speakers and the advantages and possibilities of receptive multilingualism offered by the close relatedness of the Finnish and Estonian languages. The Finnish-Estonian joint projects aims to study the L1-based comprehension of a closely related language in writing and speech.

We use a battery of tests to establish how subjects understand written and spoken closely related language either without any instructions or with differing instructions. The data consists of the responses to translation tasks, questionnaires, and interviews, as well as recorded conversations. The project is performed at the universities of Joensuu, Tallinn, Helsinki, Åbo, and Jyväskylä, involving four senior researchers, one doctoral und two undergraduate students. The goal of the research is to expand and challenge the currently very Indo-European centered view of receptive multilingualism. The research makes it also possible to compare the L1- and L2-based comprehension of an L3 and to test the theoretical claims of universality made by previous research in other languages. The overall aim is to create a holistic model of the effects of perceived and actual similarity on the mutual intelligibility. The practical goal is to use the results to provide new tools for communication between closely related languages.

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