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The similarity and Mutual Intelligibility between Amharic and Tigrigna Varieties

Summary

The paper asks how close Amharic is to two Tigrigna varieties, Ethiopian and Eritrean, and how well native Amharic speakers can understand them. It also asks whether attitudes toward each variety and contact with its speakers affect that understanding. The researchers took a short fable, "The Baboon Chief", originally in Oromo, rendered it into Amharic, and then produced versions in both Tigrigna varieties. Oromo was used as the source to avoid priming. All texts were transcribed in IPA. Cognates were aligned and compared with Levenshtein distance, and lexical distance was taken as the share of non-cognate words. Eighteen Amharic-speaking MA students in the Netherlands completed an online word-translation test plus attitude and contact questionnaires.

Both varieties came out roughly equally distant from Amharic, both phonetically and lexically. Participants understood less than a third of either variety, far below the 80% threshold commonly used to call languages mutually intelligible. They viewed the Ethiopian variety more favourably, but neither attitude nor contact correlated with test scores. The author attributes the observed intelligibility to genealogical relatedness. The results are relevant to ongoing efforts to standardize Tigrigna.

Key points

  • Phonetic distance (mean Levenshtein over aligned cognates): about 31% for Ethiopian Tigrigna and 28.5% for Eritrean Tigrigna. The difference was not significant.
  • Lexical distance: the Eritrean text had 51 cognates out of 136 words, giving 62.5% distance. The Ethiopian text had 59 cognates out of 130 words. The percentages the paper reports for the Ethiopian text appear garbled in the extraction.
  • Word-translation scores: 29.78% for Ethiopian Tigrigna and 26.11% for Eritrean Tigrigna. A paired t-test found no significant difference.
  • Attitude and contact: neither correlated with intelligibility (r = -.267 and r = 0.181). Contact with speakers of both varieties was low overall.
  • Instruments and sampling:
    • The attitude questionnaire was adapted from Bezooijen and Gooskens (2007), with 18 items on a 5-point scale.
    • Participants were excluded if they had lived abroad for more than two years or had parents from Tigray or Eritrea.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The test text was built from a third language (Oromo) rather than from the listeners' own language, so the target versions would not echo familiar Amharic wording.
  • I2. Distance was split into two parts: how many words are shared at all (lexical) and how far apart the shared ones are (Levenshtein over aligned cognates).
  • I3. Plausible explanatory factors (attitude, contact) were measured explicitly and checked for correlation with the outcome, instead of being assumed to matter.
  • I4. Participants with prior exposure (parents from Tigrigna-speaking regions, long stays abroad) were filtered out so scores would reflect relatedness rather than learning.
  • I5. A fixed external threshold (80% understood) turned a raw score into a yes/no verdict on intelligibility.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (back): When testing translation or paraphrase through the meta-world, source the inputs from an unrelated pivot text so outputs cannot win by copying the input's surface form.
  • I2 (tree): When converting or comparing UD dialects or treebanks, report vocabulary/label overlap separately from edit distance on aligned matching items, so it is clear which kind of mismatch hurts the parser.
  • I3 (learn): Treat suspected confounds such as genre, sentence length or teacher-tier source as measured covariates, and confirm they do not explain accuracy before crediting a repair rule.
  • I4 (answer): Screen evaluation fables and tests for overlap with training material, so QA scores measure reading rather than memory.
  • I5 (learn): Set explicit pass thresholds in advance for each pipeline stage, so evaluation reports clear verdicts rather than numbers that are read after the fact.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics Semitic languages

 Institutions

🎓University of VeronaVerona · Italy2 works · 12 citations

Cite

Cite as Tekabe Legesse Feleke. 2017. The similarity and Mutual Intelligibility between Amharic and Tigrigna Varieties. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w17-1206

@inproceedings{feleke2017similarity,
  title = {{The similarity and Mutual Intelligibility between Amharic and Tigrigna Varieties}},
  author = {Tekabe Legesse Feleke},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial)},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w17-1206},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w17-1206}
}

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