Dialect Intelligibility

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the communicative consequences of dialectal variation. The chapter deals at some length with two questions concerning dialect intelligibility, which is considered as major importance to linguistics in general and to dialectology in particular. The chapter gives an overview of the role linguistic factors such as lexicon, phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax and extra‐linguistic factors attitude, contact and experience, orthography, gestures in the intelligibility of dialects and closely related languages. In future research, the researchers should aim to gain more detailed knowledge about the mechanisms behind the intelligibility of language varieties. This is to provide a more solid, experimentally grounded, foundation for traditional claims made by linguists about genealogical relatedness among languages. Intelligibility between languages may also serve as the ultimate criterion to decide how structural dimensions should be weighed against each other in the computation of linguistic distance.