2017/01/01 by Mohammad Salehi, Aydin Neysani · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning #Intelligibility (philosophy) #Linguistics #Linguistics and Cultural Studies #Multilingual Education and Policy #Multilingualism #Psychology #Turkish
paper · doi:10.1080/2331186x.2017.1326653
openalex publication_date 2017/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Azerbaijani and Turkish are two closely-related languages from Oguz branch of Turkic languages, which are said to be mutually intelligible. Regarding this background, we designed an experiment within the framework of receptive multilingualism to investigate the role of linguistic factors in intelligibility of the Turkish language to Iranian Azerbaijanis. The study was carried out by controlling extra-linguistic factors such as language contact and negative attitude in order to make the findings attributable to only linguistic factors as the main focus of the present study. In the study, 40 native speakers of Azerbaijani in Iran were exposed to the Turkish language through short videos recorded from Turkish TV programs. The participants scored in average 56% of receptive intelligibility in spoken language of Turkish; though this score is not considered a high score of receptive intelligibility of Turkish to the Azeri speakers. It provides some pieces of evidence to show how this half understanding paves the way for Azerbaijanis to learn the Turkish language through mere exposure to Turkish TV programs. Furthermore, in the present study we found lexical distance, and misleading effect of false friends to be more effective than phonetic distance between cognates of these languages, in determining the strength of receptive intelligibility of the Turkish language to Azerbaijani native speakers.