By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans from the same 16 countries where the test languages are spoken. Next, we present the data from a sub-group of listeners who had not learned the test language and had had minimal exposure to it. This allows us to investigate how well the listeners understand the test language on the basis of structural similarities between their own language and the test languages. Finally, we compare the results of the two data sets to the traditional genealogic characterisation of the three language groups. We expect the intelligibility results from the second group of listeners who had had minimal exposure to the test language to be a better reflection of the genealogical characterisation than the results from the larger group who had sometimes been exposed to the test language or had learned it at school. ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the participants with 50 spoken stimuli in their neighboring language (Danish for Swedish children and vice versa) in a picture-pointing task. Results revealed that while Danish children held more positive attitudes towards Swedish than vice versa and their word recognition scores were generally higher than those of their Swedish peers, the correlation between these two variables is very low, indicating that the two variables are only loosely linked.

This investigation compares articulation rates of phonological and phonetic syllables in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish to investigate differences in degrees of syllable deletion (reduction) among these three languages. For the investigation two sets of data are used: one consisting of recorded speech from radio news and another consisting of sentences read aloud. The results of the comparative investigation show that in both data sets Danish exhibits a much larger degree of syllable reduction in speech than Norwegian and Swedish. The finding that certain syllable deletion processes take place in Danish but not in Norwegian and Swedish is viewed as typological. The results indicate that Danish words are shorter than their Norwegian and Swedish counterparts. This could be a contributing factor to problems that arise in inter-Scandinavian communication.

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Danish and Swedish are closely related languages that are generally mutually intelligible. Previous research has shown, however, that Danes comprehend more spoken Swedish than vice versa. It has been suggested that this asymmetry is caused by extra-linguistic factors such as literacy, contact with, and attitudes held towards the test language. However, also linguistic factors, such as supra-segmental features or differences in speech rate, could cause or increase an asymmetry. The aim of the experiment reported in this article was to exclude three extra-linguistic factors (attitude, contact and literacy) in order to determine their role in mutual intelligibility. Participants were 19 Danish- and 26 Swedish-speaking illiterate preschoolers. Their task was to match 50 cognate nouns to corresponding pictures in a multiple-choice task. Results revealed that word-recognition scores in Danish children (63 percent) did not differ significantly from the Swedish scores (65 percent). That means that, in contrast to adult Danes, Danish children did not perform better on the word-recognition task than their Swedish peers. This finding suggests that extra-linguistic factors play an important role in intelligibility of a closely related language, and, as extra-linguistic factors develop, the intelligibility asymmetry develops.