Intercomprehension: Reading Languages You Don’t Know

Imagine walking into a café in Lisbon. You speak Spanish, but you’ve never studied a day of Portuguese in your life. You pick up a local newspaper, Público, and glance at the headline: “O governo apresenta novas medidas para a educação.”

If you are a Spanish speaker, a lightbulb goes off. You know that gobierno is government, presenta is presents, nuevas is new, and educación is distinctively clear. Without opening a dictionary or accessing Google Translate, you have successfully decoded a sentence in a foreign language.

This isn’t magic, and it isn’t a fluke. It is a linguistic phenomenon known as Intercomprehension. It is the art of understanding languages you haven’t formally learned, and it is reshaping how linguists and educators approach the concept of multilingualism in the globalized world.

What is Intercomprehension?

Intercomprehension (often abbreviated as IC) refers to a form of communication where each person uses their own language and understands the language of the other. In a reading context, it refers to the ability to decode written text in a foreign language by bridging the gap with your native tongue—or other languages you already know.

At its core, Intercomprehension relies on the concept of language families. Languages do not exist in vacuums; they have genealogies. Just as siblings share DNA, related languages share grammatical structures, syntax, and, most importantly, vocabulary (lexicon).

While the traditional method of language learning focuses on “productive” skills—speaking and writing perfectly—Intercomprehension focuses on “receptive” skills: reading and listening. It posits that you do not need to know how to conjugate irregular verbs in Italian to understand an Italian news article if you already speak French.

The Romance Language Laboratory

The most famous playground for Intercomprehension is the Romance language family. Descended from Vulgar Latin, languages like Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian, and Catalan share a massive amount of DNA.

Linguists estimate the lexical similarity between Spanish and Portuguese to be nearly 90%. Between Spanish and Italian, it hovers around 82%. Even English, a Germanic language, shares roughly 50% of its vocabulary with French due to the Norman Conquest.

A Practical Example

To see Intercomprehension in action, let’s look at how a single sentence morphs across the Romance family. Consider the English sentence: “The university participates in the international program.”

• Spanish: La universidad participa en el programa internacional.
• Portuguese: A universidade participa no programa internacional.
• Italian: L’università partecipa al programma internazionale.
• French: L’université participe au programme international.
• Catalan: La universitat participa en el programa internacional.

If you cover the language names, the patterns become undeniable. While the pronunciation (phonology) varies wildly—especially between the nasal vowels of Portuguese and the melodious cadence of Italian—the written forms (orthography) remain stubbornly similar. Intercomprehension trains the brain to ignore the minor differences (an extra ‘e’ here, a missing ‘l’ there) and focus on the sheer volume of shared roots.

The Seven Sieves: How Educators Teach It

Can this be taught? Absolutely. Educational linguists across Europe have developed frameworks to turn unconscious guessing into a strategic skill. One of the most prominent methods is the EuroComRom project, which utilizes a concept called the “Seven Sieves.”

The idea is that by passing a foreign text through seven different “filters”, a learner can deduce the meaning of almost any text in a related language.

1. International Vocabulary: Identifying words that differ little across most languages (e.g., internet, taxi, hotel, radio).
2. Pan-Romance Vocabulary: Words derived directly from Latin that exist in all Romance languages.
3. Sound Correspondences: Learning predictable shifts. For example, the Latin ‘f’ often becomes ‘h’ in Spanish (filium becomes hijo), but stays ‘f’ in Portuguese (filho). Once you learn the rule, you unlock hundreds of words.
4. Spelling and Pronunciation: Understanding how sounds are visually represented (e.g., how the ‘ch’ in French differs from the ‘ch’ in Spanish).
5. Syntactic Structures: Recognizing that Romance languages generally follow a Subject-Verb-Object order.
6. Morphosyntactic Elements: Identifying grammatical “glue” words like articles and prepositions.
7. Prefixes and Suffixes: Recognizing that -tion in English is usually -ción in Spanish and -zione in Italian.

Beyond the Romance Family

While Romance languages receive the most attention, Intercomprehension applies to any language family.

A speaker of German can often decipher written Dutch with relative ease. A Russian speaker can navigate Ukrainian or Belarusian signs. Even English speakers possess a dormant superpower for reading Germanic languages.

Look at the Dutch phrase: “Wat is jouw naam?”
It doesn’t take a degree in linguistics to map this to the English: “What is your name?” or the German: “Was ist dein Name?”

The Benefits: Why “Imperfect” Understanding Matters

In a world obsessed with fluency, why settle for just reading? Why focus on Intercomprehension?

1. Accelerating Plurilingualism

The Council of Europe distinguishes between multilingualism (the coexistence of different languages in a society) and plurilingualism (the individual’s ability to switch between languages). Intercomprehension is the fastest route to plurilingualism. Instead of spending ten years mastering one language, a student can spend one year learning to read four.

2. Breaking the “All or Nothing” Mindset

Many language learners quit because they feel they must speak perfectly to participate. Intercomprehension lowers the barrier to entry. It validates “passive” knowledge. It tells the learner: “It is okay if you cannot write a poem in Portuguese; being able to read their news is a superpower in itself.”

3. Cognitive Flexibility

Intercomprehension turns language learning into a puzzle rather than a rote memorization task. It forces the brain to look for patterns, bridge gaps, and tolerate ambiguity. This enhances cognitive plasticity and makes learning subsequent languages significantly easier.

Navigating the Trap of “False Friends”

Of course, trusting your intuition comes with risks. We cannot discuss Intercomprehension without mentioning False Friends (false cognates)—words that look the same but mean something very different.

A famous example is the word embarazada. An English speaker might see this and confidently assume it means “embarrassed.” They would be mortified to learn they just claimed to be “pregnant.” Similarly, the Spanish word largo means “long”, not “large.”

However, proponents of Intercomprehension argue that context is usually the safety net. If you read a sentence about a street being largo, your brain will likely reject “large” if the context implies distance. Learning to spot these traps is part of the Intercomprehension training process.

The Future of Language Learning?

As English continues to dominate as the global lingua franca, there is a counter-movement seeking to preserve linguistic diversity. Intercomprehension offers a sustainable path forward. It suggests a future where a French person speaks French, an Italian speaks Italian, and they simply… understand each other.

By leveraging the history hidden within our words, Intercomprehension proves that we know more than we think we do. It transforms the intimidating wall of a “foreign” language into a bridge, built on the ancient roots we all share.