Dialect or a New Language: A Possible Explanation of the 70 % Mutual Intelligibility Threshold

distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In most cases, linguists have a consensus on when people from differ-ent regions speak two different dialects of the same language (and can, thus, understand each other reasonably well) or two different languages (in this case, their mutual intelligibility is limited). In most cases, this intuitive consensus corresponds to a 70 % mutual intelligibility thresh-old: if at least 70 % of the words from one region are understandable to people from another region, then these are two dialects, otherwise these are two different languages. In this paper, we provide a possible explanation for this 70 % threshold