Can people from two countries understand each other?
Pick two countries. You get the chance that a randomly chosen person from the first can understand a randomly chosen person from the second — at least at a basic conversational level — because they speak a language in common or two closely related ones.
Two countries
One country and the world
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The most and the least connected pairs
Among countries of more than 10 million people.
How it is measured
What the number means. Take a random person from country A and a random person from country B. The figure is the probability that the person from A understands the person from B at CEFR level A2 or above — enough for a simple conversation about everyday things.
What goes in. For every country, the share of its population who speak each language at that level, from the LINGACON Language Speakers Index (LSI v1.48, 934 languages in 237 jurisdictions). Closely related languages count partly when their speakers understand each other — Spanish and Portuguese, Czech and Slovak, Hindi and Urdu — from the LINGACON mutual-intelligibility catalogue (MIC v1.12).
What it assumes. Within a country, the languages one person knows are treated as independent of each other. The figure can differ slightly in the two directions, because understanding a related language is not always symmetric.
Coverage. 178 of CountryPair's 199 countries and territories are measured. For the other 21 LINGACON has no language-by-language data yet: Bhutan, Brunei, Central African Republic, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Hong Kong, Laos, Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Togo, Vanuatu. Somalia here excludes Somaliland, which LINGACON counts separately.
Source. LINGACON™ Project (2026), GLCI (Global Linguistic Connectivity Index): How Connected Is the World? — Supplementary Material S3, country-pair table v1.9 (LSI v1.48, MIC v1.12); method of the language data: The ALPS Index (LINGACON Project, 2026). Data: osf.io/7bshn. Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0 — LINGACON; shown on CountryPair under licence from the LINGACON Project. The full table, with a note on every pair, is on its table page.