J. Golubović: Receptive multilingual communication between speakers of Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages

Receptive multilingualism is a linguistic term used for the way of communication that is very familiar to the speakers of Czech and Slovak: using one’s native language and actively understanding the language of the interlocutor. Receptive multilingualism is also widely used in Scandinavia, with the speakers of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, but could it be used in other contexts and with more distant languages? Research into Estonian and Russian seems to suggest that some way of communication is possible even between the speakers of these languages, with only very basic passive understanding of Russian/Estonian. The MICReLa project, which started in 2011, aims to discover how intelligible different Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages are and where the potential for using receptive multilingualism might lie. So far over 42 000 people participated in this study and in this lecture I will present the methods, together with the very first results.