earticle

영어

This study aims to measure the mutual intelligibility between Yakut and other Turkic languages. In order to accomplish this research purpose, I adopted Levenshtein distance and typological properties to determine the mutual intelligibility between Yakut and other Turkic languages. Data sources are from the last version of Swadesh list in 1971 for the Levenshtein distance, and the data from WALS (The World Atlas of Language Structures) for the typological properties. The findings of the data analysis showed that the Levenshtein distance values between Yakut and Altai, Yakut and Kyrgyz, and Yakut and Uyghur do not reveal a significant difference. Even though the lexical items of Yakut present more variations compared with those of other Turkic languages, the values are less than 50, which means approximately half of lexical items are phonologically similar. The typological properties also do not indicate many differences between Yakut and other Turkic languages. Therefore, Yakut language certainly belongs to the Turkic language family in terms of typological and lexical features which are judged by the Levenshtein distance and WALS features.