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investigation, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, and their exposition to the other
sister languages. The term has been utilized in order to exemplify various
communication situations especially across Europe, but inter-Scandinavian
semicommunication between the speakers of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish has
become a matter of utmost importance. He sent the questionnaires out to
randomly-selected 300 informants who were selected from the national telephone
directory via mail in each country. The results showed that there was an
asymmetrical relationship of the degree of mutual intelligibility among the
Scandinavian languages under investigation.
Later on, Doetjes (2007) proposed to investigate the mutual
comprehension in Scandinavian context in real communication, in his own words,
“in special situations and under certain conditions” (p. 227).
In written discourse, the Galanet project (Degache, 2003) aimed at
designing a website about a common topic among four Romance languages
including Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian. The participants were
supposed to write in their native languages and read the other participants’
contributions which were already written in their own native languages. By doing
so, they were supposed to communicate cross-comprehendingly in written
discourse.
Zeevaert (2007), however, gave various examples from global
semicommunication constellations. Though the focus of the studies referred by
Zeevaert was termed as ‘semicommunication’ or ‘mutual intelligibility’ what they
reported can be considered as examples of receptive multilingual communication.
To name some of these studies, mutual intelligibility between Czech and Slovak
(Budovičova, 1987a; 1987b), Czech-Polish (Hansen, 1987), Crotian-Serbian
(Haugen, 1990), Hindi-Urdu (Haugen, 1990), Icelandic-Faroese (Braunmüller and
Zeevaert, 2001), Portuguese-Spanish (Coseriu, 1988; Jensen, 1989), Spanish-
Italian (Hansen, 1987), Frisian-Dutch (Feitsma, 1986), Macedonian-Bulgarian
(Haugen, 1990) or Russian-Bulgarian (Braunmüller and Zeevaert, 2001) were
12
studied. Common discussion point of these studies is whether RM occurs due to
the language proximity.
The phenomena of mutual intelligibility and semicommunication have
been termed as receptive multilingualism (RM) in Dutch-German intercultural
team cooperation in educational context by Ribbert and ten Thije (2007). The
interlocutors used their native languages in communicating each other while they
were holding a discussion about a curriculum. The results showed that degree of
mutual intelligibility between German and Dutch was not as high as that of
Scandinavian languages because those Germanic languages are not as closely
related as the Scandinavian ones.
Werlen (2007) studied the receptive multilingual situation in the cities of
Biel/Bienne and Fribourg/Freiburg in officially quadrilingual Switzerland. French
and Swiss German were the linguistic repertoires of the interlocutors who
participated in Werlen’s study while French was the language of the majority in
the area. In many cases, as the study put forward, the interlocutors communicated
in their own native languages. That mode of communication was given as a case
of receptive multilingual communication.
Beerkens’ study (2010) on receptive multilingual situation in Dutch-
German borderline (called as Euregio-area including the cities of Enshede,
Münster and Osnabrück) dealt with the real communication settings including
civil society and governmental organizations “which evolved by snowball effect”
(p. 15) with the corpus of 29 video-recordings of the meetings. The interlocutors
were recorded and the recordings were examined focusing on the active role of the
speaker in the spoken discourse. The study was based on an online sociolinguistic
survey in order to reveal the choice of interlocutors on language mode. The study
utilized a qualitative functional pragmatic discourse analysis to investigate the
functional aspects of receptive multilingual mode of communication. The results
of the study indicated that receptive multilingualism as a multilingual mode of
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communication was successfully utilized for business communication in the
Dutch-German borderline.
After the studies cited above, Receptive Multilingualism was accepted both
as a branch of multilingualism field and a language mode utilized extensively in
multilingual language constellations. Rehbein, ten Thije and Verschik (2012)
named the phenomenon of receptive multilingualism as Lingua Receptiva (LaRa).
Lingua Receptiva ( LaRa) was defined as “a mode of multilingual communication
in which interactants employ a language and/or a language variety different from
their partner’s and still understand each other without the help of any additional
lingua franca” (Rehbein, ten Thije, & Verschik, 2012, p. 248). In LaRa
communication, there are a variety of competences which are categorized as
linguistic, mental, interactional and intercultural competences “which are
creatively activated when listeners are receiving linguistic actions in their
“passive” language or variety” (Rehbein, ten Thije, & Verschik, 2012, p. 1).
Current studies regarding Lingua Receptiva (LaRa) was collected and
published in a special issue. In this special issue, LaRa communication between
Estonian-Finnish, Turkish-German, Turkish-Azerbaijani, Danish-Swedish and
Italian-German were studied. In Rehbein, ten Thije and Verschik’s (2012) study,
they argued the notion from pragmatic, psycholinguistic and language psychology
points of view. Receptive component of receptive multilingual communication
was elaborated on the basis of the distinction between Speaker’s LaRa-Hearer’s
LaRa and concept of understanding/comprehension which is “kernel” as a process
in such language mode.
Rehbein & Romaniuk (in print) investigated the mutual intelligibility
under the umbrella term of LaRa among Russian, Ukrainian and Polish which are
Slavonic languages. The study was based on a mixed approach consisting of both
quantitative and qualitative methods. On the one hand, quantitative analysis was
based on the counting the numbers of problematic understanding in the cases of
understanding. On the other hand, functional pragmatic analysis of the video-
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