Dialectology - Mutual Intelligibility

Mutual Intelligibility

Some have attempted to distinguish dialects from languages by saying that dialects of the same language are understandable to each other. The untenable nature of blunt application of this criterion is demonstrated by the case of Italian and Spanish cited below. While native speakers of the two may enjoy mutual understanding ranging from limited to considerable depending on the topic of discussion and speakers' experience with linguistic variety, few people would want to classify Italian and Spanish as dialects of the same language in any sense other than historical. Spanish and Italian are similar and to varying extent mutually incomprehensible, but phonology, syntax, morphology, and lexicon are sufficiently distinct that the two cannot be considered dialects of the same language (but of the common ancestor Latin).