Intercomprehension

Plurilingual education portal

Subject classification: this is an education resource.

Type classification: this resource is a course.

Initial activity

Watch this video, which explains the concept of intercomprehension in several Romance languages.

Then ask yourself a few questions:

What information did you understand?
In which languages was this information communicated in the video?
Why did you understand it?

Objectives

By the end of this section, you should be able to...

define intercomprehension;
identify the factors that enable intercomprehension;
characterise different teaching approaches.

Keywords

Multilingualism, language family, language transfer, interlinguistic intelligibility, learning autonomy.

Prerequisites

You may wish to read the page on theories and models of multilingualism.

Introduction

French linguist Jules Ronjat (1913) was the first to conceptualise the term ‘intercomprehension’. In his work, he described how speakers of different Provençal dialects were able to understand each other (Escudé, 2014, p. 46).

Today, there are many terms used to describe this phenomenon and many definitions of the concept. However, these can be classified into three groups. Intercomprehension can thus be considered a communicative practice, a skill and a didactic approach.

Intercomprehension as a communicative practice

As a communicative practice, intercomprehension is a natural and widespread process characterised by the fact that communication partners use different languages while understanding each other's language.

The writer and semiotician Umberto Eco (1994, p. 395) describes this type of communication as follows:

A Europe of polyglots is not a Europe of people who speak many languages fluently, but, in the best case scenario, of people who can meet each other speaking their own language and understanding the other's, but who, not knowing how to speak it fluently, would understand, even if with difficulty, the ‘genius’, the cultural universe that each person expresses when speaking the language of their ancestors and tradition.

In fact, this form of communication has a long tradition. A frequently cited example is the intercomprehension in Scandinavian countries between speakers of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, i.e. the continental Scandinavian languages (cf. Börestam Uhlmann, 2005; Braunmüller, 2006; Delsing, 2007). The following example illustrates the similarities between these languages using the question What is your name?:

Swedish: Vad heter du?
Norwegian: Hva heter du?
Danish: Hvad hedder du?

Other examples of language families in which intercomprehension is practised include the Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, etc.), the Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc.), Bantu languages (a group of languages spoken in southern Africa) and the languages of northern India (see Delsing, 2007, p. 231).

Beyond its historical roots and empirical examples, intercomprehension deserves to be considered not only as a spontaneous practice between speakers of related languages, but also as a communicative skill that can be developed, taught and mobilised in multilingual contexts. This perspective opens up new avenues for language teaching and for the promotion of more inclusive communication.

Intercomprehension as a skill

All communicative practices involve underlying skills, the existence of which necessarily determines the success of the communicative act.

With regard to intercomprehension, the analysis carried out as part of the EVAL-IC project, which proposes detailed reference frameworks for each linguistic activity in intercomprehension, clearly shows that intercomprehension is now understood as a multidimensional process that takes place in multilingual and multicultural contexts and promotes discursive encounters between multilingual speakers (see Ollivier et al., 2019; Ollivier et al., 2020; Bonvino et al., 2023).

This conception of intercomprehension is close to that of Balboni (2007), who proposed the term ‘intercomunicazione’. From this perspective, intercomprehension is a global mode of communication that draws on potentially partial and unequal skills in various languages, as well as additional specific skills and dispositions towards communication. These skills are combined to ensure communication between individuals who speak different languages and have not necessarily learned each other's languages. This mode of communication involves various language activities:

oral and written reception of discourse in languages in which the subject cannot necessarily express himself and in which he may have only partial comprehension skills;
oral and written production in one or more languages in which the speaker has sufficient skills to express themselves, using additional specific skills to adapt their speech to recipients who have not necessarily learned that language or those languages – this is known as interproduction (Balboni, 2009; Hédiard, 2009; Capucho, 2011);
oral and written interaction with speakers of different languages, using general reception and production skills and skills specific to multilingual interaction.

Designed as a holistic multilingual communication skill, intercomprehension involves exploiting synergies between several dimensions:

strategic, which cuts across the entire process,
linguistic, which was at the heart of early approaches to intercomprehension (see below),
sociopragmatic,
psychological,
intercultural,
non-verbal,
‘meta’ (linguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, etc.)
cognitive (Ollivier, et al., 2020).

Intercomprehension competence is thus based on general communicative competence, using (above all) interlinguistic knowledge and psychological dimensions, which enable the link between knowledge and skills to be activated. It is not only a skill in foreign languages, but also, when necessary, in the mother tongue. Indeed, in its interproductive dimension, intercomprehension also relies on the ability to adapt one's speech to people who may never have learned the language being used.

Intercomprehension as a didactic approach

In the Framework for Plural Approaches to Languages and Cultures (CARAP, Candelier et al., 2012), intercomprehension is considered one of four plural approaches to language teaching and learning (Candelier et al. 2012, p. 6). However, from a didactic point of view, it was not until the 1990s that research and projects began to be carried out, particularly in the field of Romance and Germanic intercomprehension. In this context, special mention should be made of the major pioneering projects, strongly supported by the European Commission, which have since established specific priorities and approaches in the field of intercomprehension teaching and learning. Thus:

EuRom4 and IGLO represent strongly philological trends;
MINERVA pursues objectives related to communicative and social skills;
EuroComRom and EuroComDidact separately present a philological aspect and a didactic reflection;
GALATEA is a project with an entirely didactic focus.

The same diversity can be seen in the aims and objectives of learning, which range from learning a partial skill in multilingual reading comprehension (GALATEA) to considering it as an initial stage in the development of productive skills (EuroComRom and MINERVA); the focus on words and sentences (EuRom4, EuroComRom and IGLO), the text (GALATEA) or the speech act (MINERVA); the focus on written reception (EuRom4, EuroComRom, IGLO, GALATEA) or the reception of oral interactions (MINERVA), integrating comprehension and translation simultaneously or not.

The influence of each of these perspectives is evident in several subsequent projects which, in one way or another, explore and develop each of the pioneering approaches. Thus, today we find three main trends in intercomprehension teaching, which are determined by the basic theoretical framework of the various projects and the goals of intercomprehension learning:

a more ‘philological’ approach, following EuroComRom, where intercomprehension is seen primarily as a first step towards learning languages of the same family;
a philological and didactic approach, rooted in a reading or listening teaching perspective, where lexical and morphosyntactic elements and reception strategies are integrated to aid comprehension (general and specific) of written and/or spoken texts;
two approaches aimed at learning multilingual interaction skills:

3.1. a highly didactic approach, where learning stems from learners' practice of intercomprehension (often through online interaction);

3.2. a ‘holistic’ approach, targeting different linguistic activities and simultaneously mobilising linguistic, pragmatic and non-verbal knowledge, as well as textual, discursive and experiential knowledge, derived from a second generation of projects, of which Echanger pour Changer was the first experiment in 1998–2001.

Concrete examples of these three main types of approaches are given below:

Intercomprehension based on vocabulary learning, for the learning of all target languages

The EuroComRom team has extended its activities to other language families, offering EuroComGerm and EuroComSlav and, later, publishing English - the Bridge to the Romance Languages (Hemming et al., 2011), which establishes a strong relationship between English and the Romance languages. The main principles of the Eurocom approach are explained in an extract from the Introduction to the Didactics of Eurocomprehension (2004). In addition, a team of researchers from the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, led by Franz-Joseph Meißner and collaborating on the Miriadi project, has worked on the lexicological aspects of the basic vocabulary of Romance languages and published the volume Der Kernwortschatz der romanischen Mehrsprachigkeit (KrM) (Meißner, 2016; see also Meißner, 2018), as well as a computer application (Acquiring Plurilingual Basic Vocabulary of French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish - APLURIBAV), offering exercises aimed at learning multilingual vocabulary. Unfortunately, this application is no longer available, but its presentation on this page still provides an understanding of the basic principles underlying the approach.

Parallel/simultaneous learning of comprehension (written and/or oral) in five Romance languages

Directly derived from the EuRom4 project, EuRom5, published in 2011 (and reissued several times since, Bonvino et al.), is intended for simultaneous receptive learning through intercomprehension of five Romance languages: Catalan, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. In the presentation by the General Delegation for the French Language and the Languages of France (2010), three objectives are mentioned:

"to familiarise learners with Romance languages through increasingly refined comprehension;

to provide, through the technical aids accompanying the text, the essential linguistic knowledge of the five languages concerned; [...]

to develop in learners strategies for approaching the meaning of messages written in a language that is initially unfamiliar (or only slightly familiar), but which they realise has many more similarities with the language(s) they already speak than they suspected’ (DGLFLF, 2010, p. 4).

Below is an example of one of the lessons in Catalan (the same lesson exists in the four other target languages of the method):

The team at Roma Tre University has also extended its activities to research on oral intercomprehension and its didactic applications, notably in the work of D. Cortés-Velázquez (2016).

Learning multilingual interaction skills

Written multilingual interaction as a source of learning

All the approaches described above are part of what is currently known as receptive intercomprehension. It was not until the turn of the millennium and the rapid advances in communication technology that the interactive dimension was effectively explored in the educational applications of certain projects. It was therefore the development of the Internet as a means of interpersonal communication that led to the emergence of a ‘second generation’ of projects aimed at learning intercomprehension as multilingual interaction. A pioneer in this new field, the GALANET project (2001–2004), whose promoters were mostly researchers from GALATEA, created a training platform for intercomprehension in Romance languages, enabling real-time communication (synchronous (chat) and asynchronous (forum)) between speakers of different languages, so that multilingual interaction is both the means and the goal of learning. The GALANET approach is clearly based on a socio-cognitivist perspective: ‘This meaning implies that the concept of IC in multilingual interaction is defined as the result of the combination of different contextual ingredients (languages used at the time of interaction, number of interlocutors, objectives and issues of the encounter, spatial and temporal conditions of communication, etc.) and, at the same time, as the transforming element of this same context’ (Araújo e Sá et al., 2011, p. 288).

Here is an example of a dialogue from a GALANET session, taken from Araújo e Sá & Melo (2006):

Tavirapt diz QUEM VAI COMER AO BA?
Viseupt says KEM PAGA O ALMOCO???
chave2 says What does ‘AO BA’ mean?
froberta says Does comer mean to eat?
Lisboapt says Are you going to the beach?
Tavirapt says YES
smelo1 says What's the best thing in France?
Guardapt says I'm going to eat at the snack bar
Guardapt says I don't speak French
santonella enters galanet
smelo1 says Mangiare means to eat :)
froberta says What do you usually eat?
chave2 says In France, the best thing is Camembert.
Lisboapt says The Ba is the university association bar.
smelo1 says Let's talk about our countries?
Guardapt says I'm hungry!!!
santonella says Hi visaup
Tavirapt says NO
cassino2 says Do you speak French?
Guardapt says Portuguese
froberta says Please forgive my ignorance of your language, but I like French
csilvia1 says In Italy, Parmigiano
Lisboapt says I agree with you I WANT TO KNOW WHO'S PAYING FOR LUNCH!!!!!!!!
smelo1 says In Portugal, the best thing is Cozido à Portuguesa...

Coimbrapt says BA is the academic bar

Following on from GALANET, the same partnership also proposed GALAPRO (2008–2010) for the training of multilingual trainers in Romance languages using the same methodology: ‘Galapro aims to train intercomprehension through intercomprehension’ (Araújo e Sá, 2010, p. 27).

Following this project, and in a broader consortium, the same researchers developed MIRIADI, which presented an initial proposal for specific reference frameworks for intercomprehension and a wide variety of resources for its learning.

For more information, see the lesson ‘telecollaboration’.

A holistic approach to intercomprehension aimed at developing multilingual communication skills

Based on the experience gained by Échanger pour Changer, where trainers participating in European mobility programmes were invited to reflect on the knowledge and strategies they used to understand a language they did not know during their stay in a foreign country, a diverse team of researchers continued the work aimed at constructing a holistic approach, simultaneously mobilising the different dimensions of IC. This perspective has been developed in a wide range of projects that have produced activities aimed at the progressive learning of written and oral comprehension, so as to subsequently enable written and oral interaction and written and oral interproduction. Teaching resources corresponding to activities that enable the progressive development of multilingual communication skills are currently available on the Intermove+ Project website - Module 5 (units 5 to 24).

All these more recent projects thus represent a scientific and educational journey that has lasted for more than 25 years. Their differences lie in the basic concepts that underpin them, their pedagogical approaches, the communicative goals to be achieved and the learning objectives that derive from them. However, they share a common feature: they all respond to the urgent need to meet the multilingual training needs of European citizens in the 21st century.

Take home messages

The various definitions that exist for the concept of intercomprehension can be classified into three groups. Intercomprehension can thus be considered as a (spontaneous) communicative practice between speakers of different languages, a skill and a teaching approach.
Among the language families in which intercomprehension is practised in Europe, the Romance, Slavic and Germanic languages are particularly noteworthy.
Intercomprehension competence is based on general communicative competence, supplemented by specific skills specific to this mode of communication.
Today, three main trends can be distinguished in the teaching of intercomprehension. A more ‘philological’ approach, a philological/didactic approach with a focus on reception, and approaches aimed at learning interaction skills or even multilingual communication.

Self-assessment

How can intercomprehension be defined?
Where is (spontaneous) intercomprehension practised? Give examples.
Why are intercomprehension skills not limited to foreign language skills?
What are the objectives of the different teaching approaches to intercomprehension?

Resources for further study

Araújo e Sá, M.H. & Pinho, A.S. (2015). Intercompreensão em contexto educativo . Resultados da investigação. UA Editora. https://www.miriadi.net/sites/default/files/livro-book_miriadi_-_v.01-08_-_final.pdf
Blanche-Benveniste, C. & Valli, A. (1997) (Eds.). L'intercompréhension. Le cas des langues romanes. Le Français dans le Monde, special issue.
Bonvino, E., Cognigni, E., & Garbarino, S. (2025). La didattica dell'intercomprensione tra lingue affini. Ricerca, contesti e proposte operative. Mondadori Università.
Bonvino, E., & Garbarino, S. (2022) Intercomprensione. Caissa Italia.
Caddéo, S., & Jamet, M.-C. (2013). L'intercompréhension. Une autre approche pour l'enseignement des langues. Hachette FLE.
Capucho, F. (2008) Is intercomprehension a fad? From citizen linguist to multilingual citizen. Pratiques. Linguistics, literature, teaching, 139/140, 238-250. https://doi.org/10.4000/pratiques.1252
Capucho, F. Silva, M. P., & Chenoll, A., (2018). Co-constructing meaning in international meetings - an approach to plurilingual interactions. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1474849
Doyé, P. (2005). Intercomprehension. Guide for the development of educational language policies in Europe. From linguistic diversity to plurilingual education. Reference study. Council of Europe.
Doyé, P., & Meißner, F.-J. (2010). Lernerautonomie durch Interkomprehension. Promoting Learner Autonomy Through Intercomprehension. L'autonomie de l'apprenant par l'intercompréhension. Narr.
Meißner, F.-J., Capucho F., Degache, C., Martins, A., Spiţa, D., & Trost, M. (2011). Intercomprehension. Learning, teaching, research. Apprentissage, enseignement, recherche. Lernen, Lehren, Forschung. Narr.
Ollivier, C., & Strasser, M. (2013). Interkomprehension in Theorie und Praxis. Präsens.

Bibliography

Araújo e Sá, M. H. (2010). Training in intercomprehension through intercomprehension. Principles, proposals and challenges. In D. Spiţă & C. Tărnăuceanu (Eds.), ‘GALAPRO’ or Despre intercomprehensiune în limbi romanice (pp. 13–42). Editura Universităţii Alexandru Ioan Cuza.

Araújo e Sá, M. H., De Carlo, M., & Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2011). L'intercomprensione nell'interazione plurilingue. In M. De Carlo (Ed.), Intercomprensione e educazione al plurilinguismo (pp. 287–301). Wizarts.

Araujo e Sá, M. H., & Melo, S. (2006). Del caos a la creatividad: los chats entre lingüistas y didactas. Estudios de lingüística del español, 24. http://elies.rediris.es/elies24/araujo.htm

Balboni, P. (2007). From intercomprehension to Romance intercommunication. In F. Capucho, A. Martins P. Alves, C. Degache & M. Tost (Eds.), Dialogues in intercomprehension (pp. 447–459). Católica Editora.

Balboni, P. (2009). Per una glottodidattica dell'intercomunicazione romanza. In M.-C. Jamet (Ed.), Orale e intercomprensione tra lingue romanze (pp. 197–203). Cafoscarina

Bonvino, E., Caddéo, S., Vilaginés Serra, E., & Pippa, S. (2011). EuRom5. Ler y comprender 5 lenguas románicas. Leer y entender en 5 lenguas románicas. Llegir i entendre 5 llengües romàniques. Leggere e capire 5 lingue romanze. Lire et comprendre 5 langues romanes. Hoepli.

Bonvino, E., Capucho, F., & Strasser, M., (2023). EVAL-IC an integrated approach to plurilingual competences. In C. Ollivier & S. Melo-Pfeifer (Eds.), Assessment of plurilingual competence and plurilingual learners in educational settings: Educative issues and empirical approaches (pp. 194–204). Routledge

Börestam Uhlmann, U. (2005). Interscandinavian language contact I: Internal communication and comprehensibility problems. In O. Bandle, K. Braunmüller, E. Håkon Jahr, A. Karker, H.-P. Naumann & U. Teleman (Eds.), The Nordic languages: An international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages. Volume 2 (pp. 2025–2031). De Gruyter.

Braunmüller, K. (2006). Vorbild Skandinavien? Zur Relevanz der rezeptiven Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa. In K. Ehlich & A. Hornung (Eds.), Praxen der Mehrsprachigkeit (pp. 11-29). Waxmann.

Candelier, M., Camilleri-Grima, A., Castellotti, V. De Pietro, J.-F., Lörincz, I., Meißner, F.-J., … Schröder-Sura, A. (2012), Le CARAP. Un cadre de référence pour les approches plurielles des langues et des cultures. Compétences et ressources. European Centre for Modern Languages. https://carap.ecml.at/Portals/11/documents/CARAP-FR-web.pdf

Capucho, M. F. (2011). IC fra lingue appartenenti a diverse famiglie linguistiche. In M. De Carlo (Ed.). Intercomprensione e educazione al plurilinguismo (pp. 223-241). Wizart.

Cortés-Velázquez, D. (2016). Intercomprensione orale. Ricerca e pratiche didattiche. Le Lettere.

General Delegation for the French Language and the Languages of France (2010). EuRom 5. A method for intercomprehension. DGLFLF.

Delsing, L.-O. (2007). Scandinavian intercomprehension today. In J.D. ten Thije & L. Zeevaert (Eds.), Receptive Multilingualism. Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts (pp. 231–246). Benjamins.

Eco, Umberto (1994). The search for the perfect language in European culture. Seuil.

Escudé, P. (2014). Intercomprehension as a driver of classroom activities. Tréma, 42, 46–53. https://doi.org/10.4000/trema.3187

Hédiard, M. (2009). From intercomprehension to interproduction: the impact of language use in the mother tongue. In M. H. Araújo e Sá, R. Hidalgo Downing, S. Melo-Pfeifer, A. Séré & C. Vela Delfa (Eds.). A Intercompreensão em Línguas Românicas (pp. 213 – 223). Galapro.

Hemming, E., Klein, H., & Reissner, C. (2011). English. The Bridge to the Romance Languages. Shaker Verlag.

Meißner, F.-J. (2016). Der Kernwortschatz der romanischen Mehrsprachigkeit (KrM). https://eurocomdidact.eu/?page_id=2372

Meißner, F.-J. (2018): The ‘Core Vocabulary of Romance Plurilingualism’ (the CVRP-Project). In: T. Ambrosch-Baroua, A. Kropp& J. Müller-Lancés (Eds.): Mehrsprachigkeit und Ökonomie (pp. 91-106). Open Access LMU. https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/40520/1/Meissner_The_Core_Vocabulary_of_Romance_Plurilingualism.pdf

Meißner, F.-J., Meissner, C., Klein, H., & Stegmann, T. (2004). EuroComRom. The Seven Sieves. Reading Romance Languages from the Start. With an introduction to the didactics of Eurocomprehension. Editiones EuroCom.

Ollivier, C., Capucho, F., & Araújo e Sá, M.H. (2019). Defining IC Competencies as prerequisites for their assessment, RiPLa, 2, 15–30.

Ollivier, C., Capucho, F., & Araújo e Sá, M. H. (2020). Les compétences en interaction plurilingue. Trois dimensions saillantes. In C. Hülsmann, C. Ollivier & M. Strasser (Eds.), Lehr- und Lernkompetenzen für die Interkomprehension. Perspektiven für die mehrsprachige Bildung. (p. 69–86). Waxmann.

Ronjat, J. (1913). Essai de syntaxe des parlers provençaux modernes. Protat frères. https://dn790008.ca.archive.org/0/items/essaidesyntaxede00ronjuoft/essaidesyntaxede00ronjuoft.pdf

Credits

This resource has been created by Projet PEP (discuss • contribs) (Erasmus+ project, co-financed by the European Commission) :

Filomena Capucho (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)
Christoph Hülsmann (Universität Salzburg)