# Language families



## nunoalves

Hi,

I'm not really sure how to explain my problem so i will give a bit of background on it...

I'm an admin in an online soccer management game and i'm trying to create a language system for the soccer players. Amongst other things i want to have some languages that will act like the same language in terms of comunication. For example a portuguese player would not suffer a penalty if he was playing in spain (most portuguese people can understand spanish well enough to comunicate and vice versa).
I asked three of the managers in the game about their languages and found out this works with Norwegian-Danish-Swedish, Russian-Ukrainian, Croatian-Bosnian-Serbian and also Bulgarian-Macedonian. I'm sure there are many more cases but i wasnt able to find out yet.
Hope some of you can help me with other examples and thanks a lot in advance


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## zebedee

I'm not quite sure I understand. Are you interested in communicating using football jargon? In that case the international language in use would be English. 

If what you're wanting is a basic correlation between similar-rooted languages in order to set up a basic glossary perhaps this thread should be in the Other Languages Forum.

Let me know if this is the case, and I'll move your thread to that forum.


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## nunoalves

A portuguese person can go to Spain and talk with spanish people while he is speaking portuguese and the others are speaking spanish and vice-versa).
Same would happen to a Bulgarian person visiting Macedonia or a Russian guy visiting Ukraine.
What i'm looking for is a list of groups of 2 or more languages where the above situation is possible (2 people comunicating while each is using a different language and never learned the other)

spanish-portuguese
norwegian-danish-swedish
bulgarian-macedonian-serbian
russian-ukrainian
croatian-serbian-bosnian

What other groups are there?


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## Hakro

I'd like to tell you a true story:

A small group of journalists from Nordic countries - Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland - was invited in France. During lunch we had a lively discussion in so-called Skandinaviska (which is mostly Swedish). One of our French hosts had noticed our discussion and asked the Swede:
- As you are all of different nationalities, what language do you speak?
- Well, said the Swede, I speak Swedish, this guy speaks Danish, that guy speaks Nowegian, and the Finn... well, he speaks kind of Swedish.
- And you understand each other?
- No, we don't!

That was a joke, of course. But it was also partly true because there are pitfalls, words that seem to be the same but have different meanings in different languages. This is the situation between Finnish and Estonian, too, although I'd say that the difference between these two is a bit larger than between Swedish and Norwegian, for example. It's not all clear if you can add Finnish-Estonian to your list.
If Karelian (spoken on Russian side of the border) is considered as a language, not a dialect, you can add Finnish-Karelian to the list.


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## diegodbs

The following group of languages can be reasonably well understood:

Spanish-Catalan-Galego(from Galicia)-Portuguese-Italian.


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## irisheyes0583

With a small amount of knowlege regarding German pronunciation & grammar structure, an English speaker can _read _German relatively well. Don't know about vice versa.


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## jimreilly

I hear their are African language groups that work this way.

And I'm not sure about Latvian/Lithuanian.

And back to Scandinavian languages, I'm not sure how mutually intelligible Icelandic and Faroese are, but they're closer to each other than Icelandic is to, say, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish.

Native-American languages, anyone?


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## nunoalves

Thanks for the helpful post so far everyone 
Someone edited the title of this thread to "Language families" but this title doesnt describe my problem. I dont want to know about the language families because i already have that information.
What i'm trying to find out is what groups of languages can be used to speak with eachother without having to learn the other language.

For example, 2 Romance languages: portuguese and french. If someone speaks french to a portuguese guy who only speaks portuguese he wont be able to understand it at all. Same happens in the opposite direction. The 2 languages belong to the same family and are not mutually understandable. Other example would be Hebrew and Arabic (both Semitic)... German and English (both germanic), etc.


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## Heba

Yes, Arabic and Hebrew are of the same language family.
Perhaps the only similarity that might help you in this case is that speakers of both languages produce similar sounds. The problem that you might face is that the speaker of one of these might not understand the speaker of the other as easily as Spanish people can understand Portugese speakers as you have explained.
On the basis of the fact that Arabic and Hebrew belong to the same language family, I assumed that if an Arabic language speaker hears Hebrew, he or she would understand tha main point of what is said, and vice versa. So,I once tried to watch the news in Hebrew on the television and figure out what is said, but I could not understand a word. I only discovered that the two languages share most of the sounds that cannot be easily found in many other languages.


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## JLanguage

Heba said:
			
		

> Yes, Arabic and Hebrew are of the same language family.
> Perhaps the only similarity that might help you in this case is that speakers of both languages produce similar sounds. The problem that you might face is that the speaker of one of these might not understand the speaker of the other as easily as Spanish people can understand Portugese speakers as you have explained.
> On the basis of the fact that Arabic and Hebrew belong to the same language family, I assumed that if an Arabic language speaker hears Hebrew, he or she would understand tha main point of what is said, and vice versa. So,I once tried to watch the news in Hebrew on the television and figure out what is said, but I could not understand a word. I only discovered that the two languages share most of the sounds that cannot be easily found in many other languages.


 
Not surprising considering any similarities that exist between modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic are masked by the vastly different pronunciations of the two languages. Hebrew and Arabic have no inherent mutual intelligibility, thus you shouldn't feel disappointed.


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## Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

If interintelligibility is the issue, then definitely Czech-Slovak, and to a limited degree Czech-Slovak-Polish.


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## Mulliman

Hakro said:
			
		

> That was a joke, of course. But it was also partly true because there are pitfalls, words that seem to be the same but have different meanings in different languages.


This is very true . For example the Danish word for "calm" means "fun" or "exciting" in Swedish.
The relation between the Scandinavian languages vary greatly too. For example, I as a Swede have trouble understanding most of what a Dane says, simply because he or she swallows half the letters and decides the other half isnt worth pronouncing. This depends much on what area of Denmark they come from but surprisingly i have the most problem with Kopenhageners, the ones geographically closest to us! 
Reading Danish is very easy though, as is Norwegian. People from Southern Norway are often easier to understand than for example a Gotlander or a Finno-Swede who actually speaks my language .


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## Mutichou

Last year, I went to Italy with my class. I remember that my teacher asked in French somebody how to go to a place, he answered in Italian and they understood each other more or less.


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## zaigucis

jimreilly said:


> And I'm not sure about Latvian/Lithuanian.



I dont think that it will work


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## sound shift

Turkish - Azeri, I believe.
Bahasa Indonesia - Malay, perhaps.
Panjabi - Hindi to a large extent.


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## natasha2000

nunoalves said:


> croatian-serbian-bosnian


 
This group is not actually the group of different languages.
Those three are the same language, but they have different names according to the country they are spoken. The division to three different languages is purely political one, and not linguistical. The difference among those three are the same as among for example Spanish in Argentina, Spain or Mexico, or English spoken in England, Irland, the USA or Australia.


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## jefrir

Hindi-Urdu definitely
Lithuanian won't work with Latvian or anything else I'm afraid - it's practically unique
Romanian should work with Italian or Spanish (I can understand some of it from my limited knowledge of Spanish, and apparently it's the closest language to Latin)


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## übermönch

French and Romanians understand Italian, Spanish and Portugese to a much higher degree as vice versa.
Then
Belorusian is as similar to Polish as to Russian, but many belorusian only speak Russian.
Turkish is similar to Azeri and, to a limited degree, to Turkmen.
All by all, all Turkic languages are supposedly not that different with Uzbeks being able to communicate with Kazakhs being from a completely different branch.
Persian is practically the same language as Tajik - Kurdish belongs to the same family, but it's questionable if it will be understood.
French and German are widely spoken in Benelux.
Northern Germans speak a dialect which is extremely similar to Dutch.
Danes understand Norse and Swerige better than they are understood.
Croats, Serbs and Bosnians speak, uhm, a very similar language. 
Bulgarian, Russian and, to a limited degree, Serbian have similar vocabulary.


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## vlazlo

jimreilly said:


> I hear their are African language groups that work this way.
> 
> And I'm not sure about Latvian/Lithuanian.[S]
> 
> And back to Scandinavian languages, I'm not sure how mutually intelligible Icelandic and Faroese are, but they're closer to each other than Icelandic is to, say, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish.
> 
> Native-American languages, anyone?



The Muskoghean languages are very similar, ex:  Chickasaw and Choctaw are mutually intelligible.  I think some of the Mayan dialects are also mutually intelligible


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## spakh

übermönch said:


> Turkish is similar to Azeri and, to a limited degree, to Turkmen.
> All by all, all Turkic languages are supposedly not that different with Uzbeks being able to communicate with Kazakhs being from a completely different branch.
> Persian is practically the same language as Tajik - Kurdish belongs to the same family, but it's questionable if it will be understood.


 
Being native of Turkish I very well understand people speaking Azeri on TV. I'm not sure about Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, etc. as I've no opportunity of speaking to natives of these languages. 
As for Kurdish and Persian, I've Kurdish friends from various towns of Turkey and even between them there is no good intelligibility. So I can say a mutual Kurdish-Persian intelligibility would be practically impossible.


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## jimreilly

vlazlo said:


> The Muskoghean languages are very similar, ex: Chickasaw and Choctaw are mutually intelligible. I think some of the Mayan dialects are also mutually intelligible


 
Thank you, Vlazlo! I was thinking I'd never hear about this--at least in the Forum--and I'd bet there are others too


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## jefrir

Welsh and Cornish (but I doubt there are many native Cornish speakers, and they'd just speak English anyway)


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## Setwale_Charm

Naaa!! The speakers of Cornish/Welsh will find a lot fo similarities with their own language should they decide to study the other, yet those are by no means mutually intelligible. In fact, even Old Devonian is somehow closer to Welsh. 
And I think, Uzbeks and Uyghurs should be able to understand each other but not Uzbeks and Turkmens. Russian speakers understand a lot of Belarussian and vice-versa. And I know that Romanian and Moldovan speakers have no trouble speaking to each other but then there is a lot of discussion as to whether Romanian and Moldovan aren`t one and the same language. And do not forget the speakers of various languages of Yugoslavia, Albanian excluded.


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## ronanpoirier

OK... I guess Hungarian is alone this time  Since Hungarian is the only language devil respects


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