Linguistic distance as a determinant of the mutual intelligibility between Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch language varieties

Research on the mutual intelligibility of closely related Germanic languages has shown that several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors determine intelligibility scores to a high degree. In this paper, we aim to pinpoint the precise role of the determinant phonetic distance. As for example Gooskens (2007) shows, aggregate Levenshtein distances turn out to be good predictors of the intelligibility of Scandinavian standard and dialect varieties among subjects from Copenhagen. Also in studies on other languages such as Afrikaans and West Frisian, aggregate Levenshtein distances in addition to other factors such as lexical distances, familiarity and language attitudes – have indeed proven to play an important role in predicting intelligibility scores (cf. van Bezooijen/Gooskens 2007).