Tables / History, Culture & Language
Language connectivity — can people of A understand people of B?
If a random person from A meets a random person from B, how likely is it that the person from A understands the person from B?
- How to read a cell
- How likely it is that a randomly chosen person from A can understand a randomly chosen person from B — at least at a basic conversational level — because they share a language or speak closely related ones. 90 % means nine pairs of people in ten can talk; 1 % means one in a hundred. The figure can differ slightly the other way round. Measured by the LINGACON™ Project. “No data” means the source has no figure for that pair — the note in the cell says why; “not applicable” means the question does not arise for that pair.
- Reliability
- high for the method, estimates for the inputs — LINGACON™ Project, Global Linguistic Connectivity Index (GLCI) pair table: Supplementary Material S3 v1.9 of the published GLCI paper (SocArXiv, doi:10.31235/osf.io/g3vxj_v1), on LSI v1.48, Master Scope v1.31, MIC v1.12, Methodology v1.0.12. For each language, the share of A's and of B's population who speak it at CEFR A2+ (basic conversation) or above; languages are taken as known independently within a population; related languages that are mutually intelligible count partly (MIC v1.12 catalogue). Directional: A listens, B speaks. 178 of CountryPair's 199 countries are covered; the other 21 have no row-level language data in LINGACON yet. Somalia excludes Somaliland, which LINGACON counts separately
- Answered
- 80 % of 39,402 directed cells have an answer; the rest say why not
- Refresh
- with each LINGACON release
- Credit
- Language connectivity: LINGACON™ Project (2026), Global Linguistic Connectivity Index, doi:10.31235/osf.io/g3vxj_v1 (CC BY-NC 4.0) — licence
One country against all others
Loading…
Hover a line for its note, or switch the notes on.
The table
Rows are country A, columns country B; the two-letter codes are the usual country codes (AM = Armenia, DE = Germany…). Hover a cell to see the full value and its note. A dash means “no” or “nothing recorded”; a striped cell means either “no data” (the source has no figure for this pair — the note says why) or “not applicable” (the question makes no sense for this pair, for example a sea route for two landlocked countries). “All regions” on both sides shows the whole table.