Receptive multilingualism and language understanding: Intelligibility of Azerbaijani to Turkish speakers

Abstract

This article presents an investigation of language understanding within the framework of receptive multilingualism. That Turkish and Azerbaijani are closely related languages within the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages leads to the assumption that Turkish and Azerbaijani are mutually intelligible languages. That is, speakers of these two different languages of Turkic origin can comprehend each other without much difficulty. This article aims to consider whether these languages are, in fact, as mutually intelligible as estimated, especially on the part of the Turkish speakers. In other words, within the framework of this study, the focus is on how well Turkish speakers understand written and spoken Azerbaijani. In addition, the study asks whether there is any risk of understanding failure on the part of Turkish speakers and, if yes, it will examine the grounds of such understanding failure. The results of this study in which 30 Turkish participants took part show that even though Turkish and Azerbaijani are typologically similar languages, on the part of Turkish speakers the intelligibility is not as high as is estimated.

Receptive multilingualism in Turkish-Turkmen academic counseling sessions

“…Let-it-pass Brought to you by | Lund University Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 5/25/15 9:17 PM strategy which is suggested to occur particularly in native-nonnative or nonnative-nonnative discourse (Firth 1996) is also used in receptive multilingual communications (Baumgarten and House 2007;Zeevaert 2007;Sağın-Şimşek and König 2012). However, in this study, in contrast to the early findings this strategy was not preferred by both interlocutors.…”

Livvinkarjalaisen tekstin ymmärtäminen suomen pohjalta

“…Braunmüller 2007;Schüppert 2011; turkin ja azerin kielestä ks. Sağin-Şimşek & König 2012). Lukijat hyödyntävät leksikaalisen samankaltaisuuden lisäksi sukukielisyydestä johdettua morfologista ja syntaktista metatietoa sekä toisiinsa yhteydessä olevien rakenteiden syntaktisia ja semanttisia jäsennyksiä (Rehbein ym.…”

Mutual intelligibility of a Kurmanji and a Zazaki dialect spoken in the province of Elazığ, Turkey

“…We present the first results of a larger project on mutual intelligibility between Kurmanji and Zazaki languages spoken in the province of Elazığ where the highest concentration of speakers can be found. While some studies on the mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Turkic languages have been carried out (e.g., Öztürk 2008;Sağın-Şimşek 2014;Sağın-Şimşek and König 2012;Tekin 2012), this is the first mutual intelligibility study involving Kurdish and Zazaki dialects. 4 The aim of our project is to test the mutual intelligibility of a large number of Kurmanji and Zazaki dialects by means of various tests, but here we focus on the mutual intelligibility between two Kurmanji and two Zazaki dialects spoken in villages in a geographically small area along the Keban Dam, approximately 60 km to the east of the capital of the province.…”