Abstract
The present study has examined the similarity and the mutual intelligibility between Amharic and Tigrigna using three tools namely Levenshtein distance, intelligibility test and questionnaires. The study has shown that both Tigrigna varieties have almost equal phonetic and lexical distances from Amharic. The study also indicated that Amharic speakers understand less than 50% of the two varieties. Furthermore, the study showed that Amharic speakers are more positive about the Ethiopian Tigrigna variety than the Eritrean Variety. However, their attitude towards the two varieties does not have an impact on their intelligibility. The Amharic speakers’ familiarity to the Tigrigna varieties is largely dependent on the genealogical relation between Amharic and the two Tigrigna varieties.- Anthology ID:
- W17-1206
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial)
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Valencia, Spain
- Editors:
- Preslav Nakov, Marcos Zampieri, Nikola Ljubešić, Jörg Tiedemann, Shevin Malmasi, Ahmed Ali
- Venue:
- VarDial
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 47–54
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W17-1206
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W17-1206
- Cite (ACL):
- Tekabe Legesse Feleke. 2017. The similarity and Mutual Intelligibility between Amharic and Tigrigna Varieties. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial), pages 47–54, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- The similarity and Mutual Intelligibility between Amharic and Tigrigna Varieties (Feleke, VarDial 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2024-07/W17-1206.pdf