Mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic

What is it about?

This paper seeks to answer the question of to what extent are speakers of Maltese, Libyan Arabic and Tunisian Arabic (all essentially dialects of Arabic and thus related) capable of understanding each other's language when spoken. We came up with three tests: one tests the comprehension of individual words, the other tests the comprehension of simple sentences and the third one tests the comprehension of texts. We found out that speakers of Tunisian and Libyan Arabic understand each other at about 80%, while they both understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese and speakers of Tunisian Arabic understand Maltese slightly better than speakers of Libyan Arabic. Speakers of Maltese only understand slightly more than 30% of what is said to them in both Tunisian and Libyan Arabic and seem to deal better with Tunisian Arabic.

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Why is it important?

Dialects of Arabic are essentially separate languages, despite the confusion the term "dialect" causes. Many claims have been made about to what extent speakers of individual dialects understand speakers of other dialects, but no one ever bothered to check. We did.