I heard a guy on a TV show today say that he speaks Bulgarian as a first language but that he can understand Macedonian because they are "mutually-intelligible languages." That made me want to look up other mutually-intelligible languages and here's what I found:
^Of course these are vice versa ^
- Dutch to Afrikaans, Flemish, Frisian, Low Saxon
- Malaysian to Indonesian
- Bulgarian to Macedonian
- Cornish to Breton, Welsh
- Croatian to Serbian
- Danish to Swedish, Norwegian
- English to Lowland Scots
- Finnish to Estonian
- French to Walloon, Romansh, Occitan
- Portuguese to Galician, Spanish, Catalan
- Russian to Belarusian, Ukrainian
- Romanian to Moldovan
- Samoan to Tongan
- Gaelic to Irish
- Slovak to Polish, Czech
- Thai to Laotian
- Turkish to Azeri
- Zulu to Xhosa
- Ukrainian to Polish
I think it is very interesting that a person who speaks one language can understand another language without really studying it. Too bad that there aren't more mutually-intelligible languages with English.
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